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.
BD on left; corrected to 60fps on right.
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
00;46;49;38
00;26;47;01
00;36;06;55
02;05;56;20
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.
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):
Clipped directly from the BD.Fully interpolated frame.Splotchy interpolated cloning.Fully interpolated frame.Interpolated screen tearing at top of frame to “repair” messy splice.
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.
Watch the spot remover make the plane disappear. IN THE VERY FIRST SHOT.
Clipped directly from the BD.
The damage done, let’s look closer at the retouching:
Watch pieces and small details of the plane disappear:
Clipped directly from the BD.
Disappearing porthole:
Disappearing wall fixture:
Disappearing wall decor on upper right:
Freezing
By far, the worst repair is freeze-framing the ends of shots. It’s hard to watch when the video keeps freezing. I consider it unwatchable. The bulk of it occurs during the first half, but never completely goes away. Check out the lousy spot removal here, too.
Frozen Temporal Cloning
Interpolation
Interpolation here is often combined with spot repair. It’s not the worst, but grain still freezes, dissolves, becomes magnetic; damage sticks to surfaces, and there’s ghosting. Click to see them full screen.
Maybe you think the previous three don’t look visible in motion:
Clipped directly from the BD.
But notice how parts of the picture slow down, as if they got stuck in the mud. Without knowing anything, it’s easy to dismiss it as poor encoding or a streaming hiccup. However, these are intentionally introduced errors.
Clipped directly from the BD.
There’s some microlooping, but surprisingly sparsely used.
Additionally, the subtitles have major timing issues.
The English version looks much better, even though it suffers from aggressive spot removal, some dodgy stabilization, and wobbly masking. However, there wasn’t anything that made me turn off the movie or pause it to take notes.
