Tag Archives: Bad restoration

In the Realm of the Senses (1976)

Leave a reply

The New Beverly just ran a 35mm print from 2008, still in very good condition and with excellent color. Eclair’s restoration, on the UHD from Carlotta, has completely messed-up color. In screencaps here, you can see how it’s now tinged yellow and blue. Snow and geisha makeup should be white, not urine-colored. HD Numerique has a comparison between the UHD and Criterion BD here. Eclair’s skin tones veer purple (yikes!). In every instance, the Criterion disc has color that is a good approximation to the print that I just saw.

Mobile Suit Gundam (1979, Right Stuf)

Leave a reply

Grain Removal

De-grained by Q-Tec. The de-graining itself is kind of impressive. It leaves a significant amount of cel dust, film dirt, and doesn’t really destroy lines. In a way, it’s less destructive than many “faithful” restorations.

However, Q-Tec failed to de-grain every frame. For almost every shot, the first and last frames have intact grain. Shots begin with grain, but then melt into smeariness. It’s as if it constantly goes in and out of focus. Going from grain to no-grain also looks a lot like interpolation.

Continue reading →

Devil’s Bride (1974, Deaf Crocodile)

Leave a reply

The technicians used interpolation in an attempt to remove all splices at each cut on the top of the frame:

And on the bottom:

Sometimes, retouching at the bottom doesn’t match at all, causing explicit screen tearing:

Retouching is so poor that the cement line is still present. Leave the flaw alone if you can’t do a flawless repair:

Frame blending on thrown grapes:

Full-frame interpolation. Not only is it ugly, at full speed, the picture appears to freeze:

See the mark that disappears in the upper-left corner? That’s part of the texture and supposed to be there:

Interpolation:

Interpolated spot repair propagates the scratch:

In motion, interpolation looks completely unnatural. Replacing one flaw with another is not an improvement.

Processed by Lithuanian Film Centre.

Edit 1/20/26 : The color looks absolutely bizarre. Is this really what it actually looks like? (I HAVE MY DOUBTS.)

Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers (Part 2)

Leave a reply

For part 1, click here.

Disc 2 is a lot better, but not without errors.

Hypocrites

Pulldown error. Corrected to 60fps.

Sunshine Molly

Pulldown error. Corrected to 60fps.

Too Wise Wives

Microloop. Clipped directly from the BD.
Continue reading →

Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers (Part 1)

1 Reply

Kino’s set is a mixed bag. Some movies look great. Others are restored to death. I’ll be focusing on the latter. I give lots of examples, but this post is by no means comprehensive.

Mixed Pets (1911)

Editing error:

Corrected to 60fps

Frozen, splotchy, misaligned cloning. Terrible in every way:

Some shots are untouched, but frozen cloning is pervasive:

Intertitles look super fake, but this one has an erroneous line peeking through:

Processed by Library of Congress and Dayton Digital Filmworks.

Continue reading →