Rabid Grannies (Vinegar Syndrome)

The restoration isn’t heavily scrubbed, but the beginning has a flurry of interpolated repairs. You can see the picture slightly freeze in this brief clip (slow playback to .25x and it becomes obvious):

Clipped directly from the BD.
Fully interpolated frame.
Splotchy interpolated cloning.
Fully interpolated frame.
Interpolated screen tearing at top of frame to “repair” messy splice.

Interestingly, while the above splice got a sloppy repair, lots of messy original splices later in the movie were allowed to remain.

Seven Samurai (BFI UHD)

Slowpoke Pics currently has a comparison of all three UHDs of Seven Samurai (1954). The very first screencap, of the BFI disc, shows sloppy retouching:

Smeary retouching on BFI’s UHD of Seven Samurai (detail).

(Full image here.)

The Toho UHD looks the same, but with different grading, cropping, and filtering. The Criterion UHD doesn’t have these smeary spots, but I don’t know how it looks in motion.

The Eagle (1925, Kino)

Clipped directly from the BD.

I didn’t notice any restoration artifacting. It looks like it didn’t have any restoration processing, which is good! There is wear throughout, but it’s not an issue. Everything looks natural. Video encoding is very nice. Transferred and encoded at 24fps, so motion is perfect. A wonderful as-is presentation.

F. P. 1 Doesn’t Answer (Kino)

Automated Spot Removal

Watch the spot remover make the plane disappear. IN THE VERY FIRST SHOT.

Clipped directly from the BD.

The damage done, let’s look closer at the retouching:

Watch pieces and small details of the plane disappear:

Clipped directly from the BD.

Disappearing porthole:

Disappearing wall fixture:

Disappearing wall decor on upper right:

Freezing

By far, the worst repair is freeze-framing the ends of shots. It’s hard to watch when the video keeps freezing. I consider it unwatchable. The bulk of it occurs during the first half, but never completely goes away. Check out the lousy spot removal here, too.

Frozen Temporal Cloning

Interpolation

Interpolation here is often combined with spot repair. It’s not the worst, but grain still freezes, dissolves, becomes magnetic; damage sticks to surfaces, and there’s ghosting. Click to see them full screen.

Maybe you think the previous three don’t look visible in motion:

Clipped directly from the BD.

But notice how parts of the picture slow down, as if they got stuck in the mud. Without knowing anything, it’s easy to dismiss it as poor encoding or a streaming hiccup. However, these are intentionally introduced errors.

Clipped directly from the BD.

There’s some microlooping, but surprisingly sparsely used.

Additionally, the subtitles have major timing issues.

The English version looks much better, even though it suffers from aggressive spot removal, some dodgy stabilization, and wobbly masking. However, there wasn’t anything that made me turn off the movie or pause it to take notes.