Tag Archives: Bad restoration

Devil’s Bride (1974, Deaf Crocodile)

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)

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)

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

Good Morning (Criterion)

Weird added grain. It’s very prominent, but it floats on top of the image, as if the image was de-grained, restored to death, and then re-grained. In motion it looks very smeary.

The “grain” here is divorced from the picture and slides away:

Sometimes the dissolving grain moves at a slower frame rate:

Clipped directly from the BD.

(Revised 12-9-25.)

I Was Born, But… (Criterion)

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:

Clipped directly from the BD. Also contains microloop.
Clipped directly from the BD.

The movie is encoded at 24fps, but transferred slightly slower, resulting in random whiplash-inducing stuttering.

A Straightforward Boy

Clipped directly from the BD.

Restoration work is horrible:

Frame numbers in yellow.

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: