Tag Archives: Criterion

In the Realm of the Senses (1976)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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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.

I Was Born, But… (Criterion)

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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:

Clipped directly from the BD. Also contains microloop.
Clipped directly from the BD.

The movie is encoded at 24fps, but transferred slightly slower, resulting in random whiplash-inducing stuttering.

A Straightforward Boy

Clipped directly from the BD.

Restoration work is horrible:

Frame numbers in yellow.

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: