Weird grain. It’s very prominent, but it looks like it’s floating on top of the image, giving a smeary appearance.
Sometimes the dissolving grain moves at a slower frame rate:
Good Morning (Criterion)
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Tag Archives: Criterion
The Mikado (1939, Criterion)
According to the booklet, Criterion applied DVNR for grain reduction and they did their typical hiss reduction. Regrettable, but their work doesn’t have distracting repairs and looks natural overall.
1926 Promo
Looks amazing! Clear and sharp, with wonderful grain and a generous bitrate.
I Was Born, But… (Criterion)
Dammit, another upscale from Criterion! They are inconsistent in publishing bonus features and alternate versions in HD, and they never state on the box when they upscale. I even checked Blu-ray.com and DVDBeaver before buying (both said 1080p).
Screenshots make it look ok, but in motion, the aliased deinterlacing and DVD-era artifacting is obvious:
The movie is encoded at 24fps, but transferred slightly slower, resulting in random whiplash-inducing stuttering.
A Straightforward Boy
Restoration work is horrible:
Frozen temporal cloning looks terrible in motion. The pause in this video clip is due to the broken pulldown, not an error on my end:
Seven Samurai (BFI UHD)
Slowpoke Pics currently has a comparison of all three UHDs of Seven Samurai (1954). The very first screencap, of the BFI disc, shows sloppy retouching:
(Full image here.)
The Toho UHD looks the same, but with different grading, cropping, and filtering. The Criterion UHD doesn’t have these smeary spots, but I don’t know how it looks in motion.
The Kid Brother (Criterion)
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.