The New Beverly just ran a 35mm print from 2008, still in very good condition and with excellent color. Eclair’s restoration, on the UHD from Carlotta, has completely messed-up color. In screencaps here, you can see how it’s now tinged yellow and blue. Snow and geisha makeup should be white, not urine-colored. HD Numerique has a comparison between the UHD and Criterion BD here. Eclair’s skin tones veer purple (yikes!). In every instance, the Criterion disc has color that is a good approximation to the print that I just saw.
As part of the celebration of the reopening of the Egyptian Theatre here in Hollywood, the American Cinematheque ran a 70mm print of the 2002 restoration of Playtime (1967). Since Criterion released it twice on BD, each with radically different color timing, I took note of the color. A simple test: does it look gray, like metal, or brown?
Criterion’s first BD is close to the color you’d see if you went to a 70mm screening:
Notice how gray everything is. That’s the point. Paris’ colorful life obliterated by cold, drab, and homogenous modernism.
The 2002 version does have some computer repairs that I’d probably complain about if I got a chance to look closely, but I have yet to notice them during a screening, and I go nearly every time it plays in Los Angeles.
The 2013 version:
It now has L’Immagine Ritrovata’s characteristic urine-soaked color timing.
While the new version is sharper, less grainy, more stable, it’s ruined by the ugly color. Additionally, it’s riddled with interpolation that also freezes grain. It fakes frames that are intact in the previous version.
I first saw Playtime when the 70mm prints were still new, at least as late as 2004. It was stunning. Even with 20 years of wear, the print I just saw was still beautiful. All they needed to do was scan this negative, nothing more, and the BD would have looked wonderful.
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.
