Tag Archives: Could be worse

The Kid Brother (Criterion)

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L’Immagine Ritrovata did this restoration of The Kid Brother (1927). Compared to some of their other work, they used a light touch this time. However, they used interpolation, and I consider even a single instance too much. On the whole, though, it looks ok, if suspiciously clean.

Clipped directly from the BD.

Interpolation at the bottom:

Fully faked frame. It’s easy to tell which one by how ragged it looks:

Interpolation is subtle here, but view this full size, and you can see how it destroys vertical lines and fine fabric patterns:

On the other hand, the shorts have fantastic presentations. Looks like basic transfers, tasteful stabilization, with no obvious processing artifacts. Best of all, they’re encoded at 1080i to accommodate the slower frame rate, meaning the motion is perfect!

(Downscaling does no favors for interlacing. Expand the following clips to full screen, and they’ll look much better. TVs display interlacing just fine.)

Over the Fence (1917). Clipped directly from the BD.
That’s Him!… (1918). Clipped directly from the BD.

The Kid Brother is transferred at 24fps. Gaylord Carter’s organ score is wonderful, as are many of the supplements. Skip the uninformative commentary, unless you like listening to people describe what’s happening on screen. I still prefer seeing one of UCLA’s 35mm prints.

The Time Bending Mysteries of Shahram Mokri (Deaf Crocodile)

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Click here for the first movie in the set.

Fish & Cat (2013)

For a 2013 movie, I expected this to look better. My guess is an inadequate camera. Look at that aliasing!

Clipped directly from the BD.

The running time is 141 minutes, not the 134 stated on the box.

Invasion (2017)

The first movie in the set that looks good.

Clipped directly from the BD.

However, the subtitles are horrible. There are typos throughout the set, but those for Invasion are the worst.

Later spelled “Daniel.”
Plus inconsistent placement of quotation marks.

Careless Crime (2020)

Another nice transfer.

Clipped directly from the BD.

These are probably fascinating in Farsi, but I was bored, and not having any of it by the time I got to Careless Crime. All the walking, monotonous dialog, and reading was just too taxing. I would be very interested to see Invasion, maybe even Fish & Cat, dubbed in English.

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.

Abraham Lincoln (1930, Kino)

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Overall, very nice picture quality. Good grain, looks natural.

Clipped directly from the BD.

However, the 2.0 LPCM sound decodes as surround, not mono. It’s easy to fix, but something that should’ve been caught before the disc was released.

The restoration was also pretty good. I wasn’t noticing any obvious processing artifacts, until, at 1h24m:

Clipped directly from the BD.

Sloppy, 3-frame, quick-reversed, misaligned changeover cue removal (but only one of them). I don’t get the hatred for changeover cues. You’d see them if you went to a screening of a print. They are authentic and accurate. If all that exists has cues, then that’s okay. Leave them alone, especially when the retouching isn’t flawless and invisible.

This was the only restoration artifact I noticed. I’m sure there were more, but they didn’t stick out like this one.

The improper surround sound, though, was a serious error.

Ultra Q (Mill Creek)

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Good: Grain. Few obvious restoration artifacts. Customer service. Two of my discs were bad and Mill Creek sent replacements.

Bad: No original mono. The sweetened stereo remix is jarring, even when listening on headphones with a stereo-to-mono adapter.

The series is over-subtitled. Every word is subtitled, every time, including names. The first few times are ok, but it quickly gets annoying to see repeated things like names repeatedly pop up. “Jun-chan,” “Yuri-chan,” etc., over and over. I’m undecided about the use of honorifics, but if subtitles merely copy what’s being said, then they cease to be translation and instead turn into closed captioning.

The subtitles reach ridiculous lows near the end of the series. Episode 23 features characters speaking an obviously gibberish language. One of the characters is a translator. We’re clearly not supposed to understand the words.

Episode 27 features extended portions in English…which are subtitled:

Excessive subtitling robs us of the joy of viewing without words marring the picture and that we can understand the words being spoken. Subtitles are impossible to ignore and become a crutch. We look down and still read them, even when we can understand what’s spoken.

I didn’t really notice restoration artifacts overall. The transfer is clear, clean, and some damage remains throughout, which is ok. It looks nice and natural. Not suspiciously “pristine.”

However, episode 27 has a horrible stretch of frozen cloning and scratch removal. In the sample below, the first shot is splotchy, and then turns into a still. The left side of the following shots freeze up. The scratch removal left a smear. Play it at .25x and see how much you can spot:

I am not opposed to damage repair, but if attempted, it needs to be flawless. If it results in portions of the image freezing and smearing, then leave it alone. The watery scratch removal still left a scratch.

After that horrid repair, I was on high alert.

Interpolation:

How did I catch it? I wasn’t frame-stepping as if I was neurotic. I simply noticed that the picture seemed to freeze: