Restored to death by The Chimney Pot. No grain, but a layer of dissolving fine noise on top instead. An overall smeary look. Not worth watching.
The Saragossa Manuscript (Yellow Veil)
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Tag Archives: Bad disc
The Hands of Orlac (Eureka)
Eureka’s BD of The Hands of Orlac (Orlacs Hände, 1924) has one of the most aggressive and inept restorations I’ve seen. Nearly every shot has restoration artifacts.
Be sure to click on the GIFs to see them full size.
Interpolation
The first and last frames of most shots are interpolated. Sometimes it looks like a duplicate pulldown frame. Other times, it introduces some serious distortions. Nearly every example in this section has frames that are completely computer-generated. Faked.
Conrad Veidt’s head stretches, Alexandra Sorina’s fingers split, grain and background warp, plus frozen temporal cloning at the top edge:
The pen is broken up and the rest of the frame is nearly frozen:
Stuck grain and warping throughout:
Hideous computer-generated teeth:
Not a freeze-frame, but interpolation:
Interpolation makes scratches stick to the image:
Here, interpolation is combined with spot removal. At first glance, it’s impressive. Look closer, and you can see that it leaves smudges in place of damage AND it leaves remnants behind:
Notice how the sheets of paper distort:
Here it’s combined with frame blending and frozen temporal cloning:
Interpolation utterly fails when it’s called upon to generate background, such as behind Veidt’s head. And check out his smashed head and hand:
Veidt’s hand becomes putty and merges with the sleeve. The sofa pulsates:
You can see magnetic scratches on the wall behind the now-breathing sofa:
I admit that it’s not always immediately apparent recognizing restoration artifacts on a small screen, but look how obvious it is here when displayed at a fraction of its full size! The man gets smashed. And that background…
Interpolation is combined with temporal cloning on the ceiling lamp and chairs on the left. They now bob up and down:
His body compresses and arm stretches, creating a second wrist. Yikes!
Veidt’s head smashes into an invisible curved ceiling:
Our villain’s fingertips disappear. The disembodied hand on the left is completely frozen:
Interpolation destroys the head:
An example of interpolation that is nearly a freeze-frame, plus some negligible spot removal:
The foot disappears:
A Holy Place (Eureka)
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.
Ashkan, the Charmed Ring and Other Stories (Deaf Crocodile)
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.