Natural grain. No unnecessary processing, no artifacting. Occasional hard subs are lamentable, but looks great overall. From the Cinémathèque de Toulouse.
Strike runs at 19fps and is encoded at 24fps. New English video intertitles.
Two main issues: broken pulldown and microloops. The source print is step-printed and the video was stretched further for the BD, resulting in a very clumpy pulldown. You can see the strobing at the climax is completely broken.
The elements are there for a good presentation. Nice scan, nice encoding, no artifacting, but the technicians didn’t make the effort to fix the pulldown, even taking into consideration that they stretched to 24fps.
Microloops at
The source looks like a circulating repertory print with characteristic dirt buildup. I’m puzzled why Flicker Alley didn’t physically clean it before scanning.
Storm Over Asia runs at 6-24fps and is encoded at 24fps. The included Chess Fever is upscaled.
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 restoration isn’t heavily scrubbed, but the beginning has a flurry of interpolated repairs. You can see the picture slightly freeze in this brief clip (slow playback to .25x and it becomes obvious):
Interestingly, while the above splice got a sloppy repair, lots of messy original splices later in the movie were allowed to remain.
I didn’t notice any restoration artifacting. It looks like it didn’t have any restoration processing, which is good! There is wear throughout, but it’s not an issue. Everything looks natural. Video encoding is very nice. Transferred and encoded at 24fps, so motion is perfect. A wonderful as-is presentation.