According to the booklet, Criterion applied DVNR for grain reduction and they did their typical hiss reduction. Regrettable, but their work doesn’t have distracting repairs and looks natural overall.
Looks amazing! Clear and sharp, with wonderful grain and a generous bitrate.
Dammit, another upscale from Criterion! They are inconsistent in publishing bonus features and alternate versions in HD, and they never state on the box when they upscale. I even checked Blu-ray.com and DVDBeaver before buying (both said 1080p).
Screenshots make it look ok, but in motion, the aliased deinterlacing and DVD-era artifacting is obvious:
The movie is encoded at 24fps, but transferred slightly slower, resulting in random whiplash-inducing stuttering.
Restoration work is horrible:
Frozen temporal cloning looks terrible in motion. The pause in this video clip is due to the broken pulldown, not an error on my end:
Processing on Eolomea (1972) was so bad that it deserved its own post. See here.
I found a tiny bit of interpolated cloning while looking for a sample, but it’s minor. Looks good overall. The only feature in the set that didn’t have any jarring repairs.
Filtering leaves residue from previous frames:
Bad splice handling that uses Interpolation, microloops, and appalling pixelation. How is this better than visible cement splices (which are mostly masked out during film projection)?
General interpolation and misalignment:
There’s some weird masking and screen tearing going on, but I can’t tell if it’s original. Overall ok.
Edit: Turns out, some of the weirdness I was noticing is AI upscaling dreck. Lots of examples in this thread at Blu-ray.com. Deaf Crocodile’s disc apparently is better. Maybe I’ll get it. Still…
Sloppy repairs are few, but present:
Very rough, but natural.
Edit: Or is this also an AI upscale? I initially thought the source was 16mm, but those edges and the dull color is very suspicious.
The best looking film in the set.
Pleasingly, the features aren’t overly scrubbed, which makes the repairs all the more frustrating. There are enough remaining flaws that no one would have noticed their presence had they been allowed to remain.
And a pet peeve: these features don’t have end credits, but DEFA added new end screens immediately upon fadeout, destroying what I consider a cool effect, akin to seeing a play without a curtain call. How often do you see movies without end credits?
It’s a bad sign when I pop in a disc, just to see how it looks, and find obtrusive repairs less than a minute after hitting play.
Just about every splice is accompanied by interpolation and freezing.
Interpolation:
Freezing:
People are poorly rotoscoped (often with interpolation) against a frozen background.
Can you spot the misaligned repair?
I don’t understand why Eureka’s upscaling and interlace handling is so poor:
Live-action portions have magnetic grain and major macroblocking in the darks. Grain in the animation also tends to have a halting, dissolving quality.
De-grained. There’s noise, but it doesn’t look natural.
Smeary. Dissolving damage. Frozen cloning. Screen tearing. Freeze-frames. Broken stabilization. Interpolation.
The broken stabilization is more apparent here:
And the shorts? All upscales.
