After finishing Ashkan, the Charmed Ring and Other Stories, I popped in the disc of A Holy Place (Sveto mesto, 1990), and, by damn, it has the same frame rate problem!
Just like with Ashkan, it drops a frame every second. What a waste of a beautiful transfer of a lightly-worn print.
I initially misread that as “one frame per shot,” which would have been no big deal. So, to see such choppiness really caught me off guard:
It’s really noticeable and distracting throughout the movie, though the hand-held shaky cam helped hide some of it.
If this is the best version, I have some questions. Why couldn’t the 25fps original be used? Does it still exist? The video that remains is basically slowed down; slowing the original down to 24fps would be effectively the same. Why couldn’t it be a 25fps->1080i60 conversion? What about the sound? Is it slowed or pitch-corrected?
I’m not thrilled with the video compression, but it could be worse:
A poor presentation. Whatever the price is for this four-disc set, it’s 25% too much.
Good: Grain. Few obvious restoration artifacts. Customer service. Two of my discs were bad and Mill Creek sent replacements.
Bad: No original mono. The sweetened stereo remix is jarring, even when listening on headphones with a stereo-to-mono adapter.
The series is over-subtitled. Every word is subtitled, every time, including names. The first few times are ok, but it quickly gets annoying to see repeated things like names repeatedly pop up. “Jun-chan,” “Yuri-chan,” etc., over and over. I’m undecided about the use of honorifics, but if subtitles merely copy what’s being said, then they cease to be translation and instead turn into closed captioning.
The subtitles reach ridiculous lows near the end of the series. Episode 23 features characters speaking an obviously gibberish language. One of the characters is a translator. We’re clearly not supposed to understand the words.
Episode 27 features extended portions in English…which are subtitled:
Excessive subtitling robs us of the joy of viewing without words marring the picture and that we can understand the words being spoken. Subtitles are impossible to ignore and become a crutch. We look down and still read them, even when we can understand what’s spoken.
I didn’t really notice restoration artifacts overall. The transfer is clear, clean, and some damage remains throughout, which is ok. It looks nice and natural. Not suspiciously “pristine.”
However, episode 27 has a horrible stretch of frozen cloning and scratch removal. In the sample below, the first shot is splotchy, and then turns into a still. The left side of the following shots freeze up. The scratch removal left a smear. Play it at .25x and see how much you can spot:
I am not opposed to damage repair, but if attempted, it needs to be flawless. If it results in portions of the image freezing and smearing, then leave it alone. The watery scratch removal still left a scratch.
After that horrid repair, I was on high alert.
Interpolation:
How did I catch it? I wasn’t frame-stepping as if I was neurotic. I simply noticed that the picture seemed to freeze:
Two BD releases of The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923), both riddled with restoration artifacts.
I like that it’s a color scan of a tinted print, which allows the subtle, imperfect color variations inherent in the process. The tints on Universal’s version are recreated.
The most common artifact comes from either poor compression or automatic spot removal gone awry (I’m guessing the latter):
Most of the time they look like specks of dirt, but if you look closer, they are hard tiny blocks.
Also frequent is frozen temporal cloning:
The next three examples each have multiple instances of frozen temporal cloning:
Sloppy retouching:
Quick-reverse temporal cloning:
Quick-reversing is when frames are repeated in the manner of ABCDCDEF. It’s often applied to entire frames. For this edition, Flicker Alley combined it with temporal cloning. It’s no better than frozen temporal cloning, as you can see the picture “seize up.” Maybe not all the time, but done enough times, you’ll start to notice something’s off.
One thing I’ve heard in commentaries and interviews from the people that produce restorations is that these artifacts aren’t visible in motion. Well, up next, straight-from-the-disc at 21.5fps:
Stabilization:
Stabilization was applied relatively sparingly. I don’t particularly care for stabilized silents; they have a tendency to float and rotate around the center. Here is an egregious use of it:
Lon Chaney was in front of a wall, facing a camera locked to a tripod. Stabilization warps every bit of this shot.
Continue readingKino’s BD of Blood and Sand (1922) has relatively little computer repair work done on it, but what there is, is sloppy.
The most common restoration artifact here is what I call “quick-reverse” (QR) frames. It is when, instead of the film advancing as a normal ABCDEFGH, frames repeat like ABCDCDEFGH. It gives a feeling of the movie seizing up and is ugly to see in motion. Here, it’s limited to some titles.
Above, you can see Kino’s original with QR frames compared with those frames removed (and encoded at 60fps). Kino also added an additional repeating four frames to pad the length, but in this case they are far enough away from their initial appearance than it doesn’t register as looping frames. If you must pad out the length by repeating frames, spacing them out to break our persistence of vision works ok. In my corrected example, I removed these, too.
However, video is capable of arbitrary frame rates. Just stretch the playback speed in the timeline.
Some ugly interpolation:
The remaining errors are mostly frozen temporal cloning. What follows are some of the worst.
Notice how the frozen temporal cloning above is misaligned and has a blurry edge. The technician needs to align it and use a harder brush and choose an indistinct source frame far enough away that it doesn’t result in either frozen or quick-reverse temporal cloning.
Two thirds of the above frame are frozen, including the boy, which is the one part of the frame that shouldn’t be frozen. This spot also coincides with the 24fps pulldown. The same frame is shown for a duration of three frames, which means this spot runs for the equivalent of six frames per second!
Deleting that mostly-frozen frame results in a tiny jump cut, but the technician created that jump when cloning the motion out of existence.
And an editing error at 1:02:51:
The source print has lots of damage, though it still looks good. The damage is not particularly bad, but it’s there and occasionally significant. I find it hard to believe that the damage covered by these sloppy repairs was worse than and intolerable in relation to the damage that remains.
Blood and Sand is transferred at 19fps and encoded at 24fps.
PS: I would love a better word to describe quick-reverse frames.