Tag Archives: Blu-ray

The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Flicker Alley, Universal)

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Two BD releases of The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923), both riddled with restoration artifacts.

Flicker Alley (FA)

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.

In addition to damaging the text, the spot removal left an ugly retouched line at the top.
Watch Norman Kerry’s beads disappear.
Text disappears.
Obliterated text.

Also frequent is frozen temporal cloning:

There’s almost nothing left of the “restored” frame.
The top of the image suffers from misaligned frozen cloning and messy retouching. Spot removal was applied after stretching to 24fps.
This piece of frozen cloning in the lower right lasts three frames.

The next three examples each have multiple instances of frozen temporal cloning:

Sloppy retouching:

The retouching at top is misaligned, has a hard edge, and doesn’t even remove the cement splice.

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.

The top of this frame repeats.
Misaligned, hard-edged, quick-reverse temporal cloning at top.
Quick-reversing is easy to spot when it’s applied to motion.

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:

Pay attention to the horse at top right. Quick-reverse in action.

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.

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Blood and Sand (Kino)

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Kino’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:

Above brightened to see detail

The remaining errors are mostly frozen temporal cloning. What follows are some of the worst.

Top third of frame is frozen.
Top of frame is frozen and has an obvious seam.
Retouched area is a frozen splotch that doesn’t match.
Detail of above splotch.
Frozen splotch at top right.
Detail of above splotch.

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.

Top third of frame is frozen and misaligned.

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.

The Valley of Silent Men (Undercrank)

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Undercrank’s presentation of The Valley of Silent Men (1922) looks wonderful on BD. It looks like no computer restoration was inflicted on it. Just a good scan with good video encoding. I wish more silents were handled this way.

There’s just one thing, and it has to do with frame rate. It’s transferred at 21fps, and like almost all speed-corrected silents on BD, it’s encoded at 24fps, which introduces motion stutter, though I’m not going to discuss that systemic issue right now. What I want to point out is how the stills were processed.

Stills were used to fill in some of the gaps. Some of them have panning animation applied. However, this part of the work was done at 21fps, which means it stutters. By removing duplicate frames and encoding to 60fps, you can get smooth motion:

While 21fps is consistent with the rest of the presentation, the animation could have been done at a native 24. Why introduce stutter when you don’t have to?

Lights of Old Broadway (Kino)

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The worst, most egregious restoration processing happens four minutes into the movie. There is a major scratch that the technician unwisely attempted to eliminate. Instead, it looks like the picture is melting:

Use the controls to slow down playback and you can clearly make out how shoddy the repair work is.

Look at the background. Notice how interpolation makes the bricks move and distort. Temporal clone repairs are misaligned on the window. Damage that normally lasts one frame now dissolves over several. Grain is completely ruined.

The upper half of this frame is frozen and the seam is obvious.

A completely interpolated frame. These never look good and they never look natural in motion. Notice how dirt, scratches, and grain get interpolated.

Frozen temporal cloning. The retouched area doesn’t even match.

Interpolation obliterates Marion Davies’ hands. It also interpolates that giant hole on the upper-right window, thereby creating even more damage. It also has a tendency to move stationary objects, seen in the wall to the right of the center window at the bottom of the frame. That “oh-so-horrible” scratching is still there.

Frozen temporal cloning, the scourge of most modern restorations, seen here most clearly on the moving platform.

The top of the frame is frozen and slightly misaligned. Perhaps done to remove a cement splice, but the result is screen tearing, which looks like garbage.

Interpolation ruins every bit of this frame. Notice the distortion of Davies and the man as they pass each other. Around them, the background distorts. Half the face of the right-most man disappears. A scratch at the top is propagated. Grain seizes up. It would be better to have no frame than a faked frame.

There is more than one shoddy repair in the above clip, but I’ll point out only one:

Frame interpolation should never be used.

Lights of Old Broadway is encoded at 24 fps. It is also transferred at 24, except for an inexplicable 20 seconds during the parade scene, when it switches to a stuttery variable frame rate.