Tag Archives: Blu-ray

The Hands of Orlac (Eureka)

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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:

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Back Pay (Undercrank)

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Like The Valley of Silent Men on the first disc of the set, Back Pay (1922) looks like an as-is presentation. Natural grain, no obvious restoration processing, nice encoding. It looks wonderful.

Clipped directly from the BD.

Back Pay is transferred at 21fps and encoded at 24fps. Too stuttery, but as good as it’s gonna get in our 24fps-or-nothing world.

The Spanish Dancer (Milestone)

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Good grain, natural stabilization, nice grading, few noticeable processing artifacts. Overall good presentation of The Spanish Dancer (1923).

Clipped directly from the M2TS.

Alas, it has some errors.

Quick-reverse:

Quick-reverse on the left, fixed on the right. Both sides corrected to 60fps.

Mindless spot repair:

The full shot also combines frozen temporal cloning and quick-reversing, mostly on the left side. There’s still so much damage. They should’ve left it alone.

Quick-reversing, frozen temporal cloning, and workflow errors. Clipped directly from the M2TS.

Editing error at 47m43s, where eight frames repeat:

Editing error, followed by fixed version. Corrected to 60fps.

Bill Ware’s music is wonderful. It includes a light touch of sound effects, too, but…does every door have to squeak?

The Spanish Dancer is transferred at 18fps and encoded at 24fps with an uneven pulldown. Frequently, a frame gets repeated twice.

The Little Mermaid (1989)

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Yesterday, the Academy Museum ran an original print of The Little Mermaid (1989). A very rare treat. I think the last time it ran in 35mm in Los Angeles was about 20 years ago at LACMA.

A few things struck me. It is VERY grainy and much of the movie has a haze over it, sometimes quite strong. Even the end credits—the blue lettering bloomed into the black.

Most surprising to me was that Ariel’s hair is red-orange, not red. It had been so long since I last saw the movie that I had come to think it was red.

There’s a nice comparison here, comparing the new UHD to the previous BD. In every instance, the UHD color is too saturated and seriously goosed. The BD more closely looks like the print I just saw. The colors were vibrant for the time, but duller than we’re used to seeing nowadays.

Mother / The End of St. Petersburg (Flicker Alley)

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Flicker Alley’s presentation of Mother (1926) is a bit of a throwback to when silents were released on home video with whatever print the distributor happened to own. Nowadays, with so many movies getting processed to death, it’s jarring to see a major silent presented as-is from a well-worn print. Still, the transfer is nice. Natural grain, no major compression issues, and most importantly, no restoration artifacts.

Clipped directly from the BD.

As you can see, it’s rough, but it’s nicely encoded. I suppose it could be processed with new grading and stabilization, but it’s so easy to be heavy-handed, that I think I’d prefer this. Besides, it’s clearly not first-generation material, so what’s the point?

The End of St. Petersburg (1927), also well-worn, derives from Mosfilm’s 1969 restoration. It runs at a variable frame rate, primarily 24fps (most of the time) and 18fps, step-printed in 1969. I wonder about the accuracy of this. 18fps makes sense for slower scenes in the first half, but the dips in speed are drastic and inconsistently applied as the action and editing get faster in the climax.

FA’s transfer has further stretching that results in random single frames being duplicated, mostly in the second half. Many of these are easy to miss amid the frantic action. However, it’s another nice encode.

Clipped directly from the BD.

When Mosfilm step-printed in 1969, they introduced a lot of debris. You can see this when frames get repeated; you end up with the same image getting completely different layers of dirt and different exposures. They also introduced gate weaving and occasional out-of-focus frames (at splices). By undoing their step-printing, we can get non-destructive repair:

Left: 1969 step-printing. Right: Step-printing removed and corrected to 60fps.

The difference is slight, but the right side is a little cleaner and gate weave is more natural and less…slippery. It may not be noticeable in this short clip, but over the course of the movie, and on a big screen, the 1969 step-printing defects are visible.

I am very curious what original material actually exists and its condition. Alas, Ukraine. Oh, well…

Mother is transferred at 20fps and encoded at 24fps. The End of St. Petersburg is transferred with a variable frame rate, 8-24fps, and encoded at 24fps.