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.
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.
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.)
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.
Click here for the first movie in the set.
For a 2013 movie, I expected this to look better. My guess is an inadequate camera. Look at that aliasing!
The running time is 141 minutes, not the 134 stated on the box.
The first movie in the set that looks good.
However, the subtitles are horrible. There are typos throughout the set, but those for Invasion are the worst.
Another nice transfer.
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.
Good grain, natural stabilization, nice grading, few noticeable processing artifacts. Overall good presentation of The Spanish Dancer (1923).
Alas, it has some errors.
Quick-reverse:
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.
Editing error at 47m43s, where eight frames repeat:
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.
Overall, very nice picture quality. Good grain, looks natural.
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:
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.