Tag Archives: Criterion

The Unknown (1927, Criterion)

Broken frame rate

Criterion transferred The Unknown at a little under 23fps and encoded at 1080i. The motion should be perfect, right? Wrong! Somebody messed up and used a 24fps timeline, then exported at 1080i60. Notice how the motion stutters in the top sample below. The whole reason to use 1080i is to prevent that!

After deinterlacing, we can easily see the uneven, broken pulldown, worse than most silents authored at 24fps. Below screenshot is of a tool I wrote to help delete duplicated frames. What you see on the right is a long list of frame numbers. All frames highlighted in red are duplicates and can be safely deleted.

Encoding silents to 1080i60 applies its own unusual pulldown. So, the result of working in 24fps and exporting at 1080i60 is that two different pulldown patterns compounded to create terrible stuttering.

Poor retouching

Frozen cloning doesn’t match:

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In the Realm of the Senses (1976)

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.

Burden of Dreams (Criterion)

Occasional magnetic grain. For this sample, I had to convert from AVC to H265 to get a small file size, but it’s still visible. This was the most glaring bit of magnetic grain on the UHD.

Magnetic grain surrounds the plane.

Compression or bad restoration, it’s impossible to tell which. Still, watchable.

Most of the supplements, including Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe (1980) are 1080i upscales.

Good Morning (Criterion)

Weird added grain. It’s very prominent, but it floats on top of the image, as if the image was de-grained, restored to death, and then re-grained. In motion it looks very smeary.

The “grain” here is divorced from the picture and slides away:

Sometimes the dissolving grain moves at a slower frame rate:

Clipped directly from the BD.

(Revised 12-9-25.)

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.

Clipped directly from the BD.

1926 Promo

Looks amazing! Clear and sharp, with wonderful grain and a generous bitrate.

Clipped directly from the BD.