Tag Archives: Deaf Crocodile

The Tune (Deaf Crocodile)

Microloops galore. Nearly every shot begins with a microloop. Microloops frequently occur mid-shot, too. Duplicated frames are separated by one or two frames, never breaking persistence of vision. You won’t see them all, but you’ll definitely notice some of the ones that happen mid-shot. They are very hard to demonstrate. In these samples, I put the repeated frames next to each other, with the frame number on top, so you can see that these are the exact same frames.

Frozen cloning isn’t a huge issue, but it still happens, and it’s crude and ugly as sin:

The Flying House – Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend

My complaints with this interesting re-working are solely on technical issues (though no one should call this a restoration, ever).

Pulldown issues. Stuttering, like a speed-corrected silent encoded at 24 fps…

…and dropped frames, like a poor PAL-NTSC conversion:

Intertitle that loops a handful of frames for its duration. I hate it in new versions of silents, and it definitely shouldn’t happen when an artist has complete control on reworking an old work (still image sample):

Your Face / Guard Dog

In contrast to the feature, the two shorts look great. I didn’t see any restoration artifacts when spot-checking, whereas I came across multiple artifacts at every spot I looked at in The Tune.

About the disc itself…

I hate fancy disc menus. The BD menu has a short loop FROM THE CLIMAX of the film that plays over the entire menu. Heaven forbid you need more than a few seconds to make a selection. I rushed for the mute button.

Zoom shit:

I don’t care how interesting the interviews are, I’m not watching Zoom meetings. They’re low-effort and look like garbage. Look at that screenshot. They didn’t even agree on horizontal or vertical. Yeah, low budget, blah, blah. But you could, like, you know, EDIT. And FRAME. And CROP. We don’t need to watch a 10 GB hour-long video of this.

The Tune, Your Face, and Guard Dog were processed by Academy Film Archive.

Devil’s Bride (1974, Deaf Crocodile)

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The technicians used interpolation in an attempt to remove all splices at each cut on the top of the frame:

And on the bottom:

Sometimes, retouching at the bottom doesn’t match at all, causing explicit screen tearing:

Retouching is so poor that the cement line is still present. Leave the flaw alone if you can’t do a flawless repair:

Frame blending on thrown grapes:

Full-frame interpolation. Not only is it ugly, at full speed, the picture appears to freeze:

See the mark that disappears in the upper-left corner? That’s part of the texture and supposed to be there:

Interpolation:

Interpolated spot repair propagates the scratch:

In motion, interpolation looks completely unnatural. Replacing one flaw with another is not an improvement.

Processed by Lithuanian Film Centre.

Edit 1/20/26 : The color looks absolutely bizarre. Is this really what it actually looks like? (I HAVE MY DOUBTS.)

Strange New Worlds: Science Fiction at DEFA (Eureka)

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Processing on Eolomea (1972) was so bad that it deserved its own post. See here.

The Silent Star (1960)

I found a tiny bit of interpolated cloning while looking for a sample, but it’s minor. Looks good overall. The only feature in the set that didn’t have any jarring repairs.

Clipped directly from the BD.

Signals (1970)

Filtering leaves residue from previous frames:

Bad splice handling that uses Interpolation, microloops, and appalling pixelation. How is this better than visible cement splices (which are mostly masked out during film projection)?

General interpolation and misalignment:

In the Dust of the Stars (1976)

There’s some weird masking and screen tearing going on, but I can’t tell if it’s original. Overall ok.

Edit: Turns out, some of the weirdness I was noticing is AI upscaling dreck. Lots of examples in this thread at Blu-ray.com. Deaf Crocodile’s disc apparently is better. Maybe I’ll get it. Still…

Sloppy repairs are few, but present:

Love 2002 (1972)

Very rough, but natural.

Edit: Or is this also an AI upscale? I initially thought the source was 16mm, but those edges and the dull color is very suspicious.

Clipped directly from the BD.

The Robot (1968)

The best looking film in the set.

Clipped directly from the BD.

Pleasingly, the features aren’t overly scrubbed, which makes the repairs all the more frustrating. There are enough remaining flaws that no one would have noticed their presence had they been allowed to remain.

And a pet peeve: these features don’t have end credits, but DEFA added new end screens immediately upon fadeout, destroying what I consider a cool effect, akin to seeing a play without a curtain call. How often do you see movies without end credits?

EDIT 11/17/25 – I just got the Deaf Crocodile release and did a quick spot check. Signals actually looks like 70mm this time, as opposed to Eureka’s grainy 2.35:1. In the Dust of the Stars is the same bad restoration. Grain is poor, looking like video noise. De-graining is frequent.

Cat City (Deaf Crocodile)

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There’s typical frozen temporal cloning. The bigger problem is that there are about 100 freeze frames. Some have negligible clone repairs, but usually the picture simply freezes.

Frozen picture. Yellow number indicates frame number.

Picture is mostly frozen, with some misaligned cloning.

The shorts got worse processing, especially at splices.

Let Us Get a Dog (1974)

Freeze frame:

Interpolation:

Frozen cloning, screen tearing, misalignment:

Where is the Limit? (1975)

Frozen cloning:

Screen tearing:

Interpolation:

This interpolated frame includes a microloop.

Restoration processing by Hungary National Film Institute Filmlab.

Samm Deighan’s irritating uptalk-filled commentary approaches the movie with the assumption that animation is for children. It sounds like a dry book-report academic lecture, instead of someone who is an expert in Hungarian cinema. Skip it.