While the processing wasn’t egregious enough to make any notes while watching, splices tended to be replaced by a combination of microloops, frozen temporal cloning, and interpolation. Still, a light hand overall.
(Frame number in yellow.)
Jackie Chan’s finger is stuck to the background and fine damage lasts an additional frame:
Processing on Eolomea (1972) was so bad that it deserved its own post. See here.
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.
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:
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:
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.
The best looking film in the set.
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.
It’s a bad sign when I pop in a disc, just to see how it looks, and find obtrusive repairs less than a minute after hitting play.
Just about every splice is accompanied by interpolation and freezing.
Interpolation:
Freezing:
People are poorly rotoscoped (often with interpolation) against a frozen background.
Can you spot the misaligned repair?
I don’t understand why Eureka’s upscaling and interlace handling is so poor:
Live-action portions have magnetic grain and major macroblocking in the darks. Grain in the animation also tends to have a halting, dissolving quality.
De-grained. There’s noise, but it doesn’t look natural.
Smeary. Dissolving damage. Frozen cloning. Screen tearing. Freeze-frames. Broken stabilization. Interpolation.
The broken stabilization is more apparent here:
And the shorts? All upscales.
The English version of The Blue Angel (1930) looks wonderful and far better than the German version. It has natural looking grain and no restoration processing artifacts—a benefit of being the neglected version.
Grain on the German version looks blurry. Look closely at the second duck and you can see restoration artifacting.
However, the biggest problem with the German version is that the technicians tried to remove every cement splice, creating lots of interpolated and frozen errors. These are just two random ones I found. Pretty much every splice is like these:
Splices are visible in the English version, but they don’t detract at all.
Extras are all SD, and the ones from archival video sources are converted to 24fps instead of left at 50i/60i. Blech.
I’m surprised the English version is so ignored. Most of the movie is still in German and tacks closely to the German version. It works really well. Why read a movie when you don’t have to? English speakers should default to the English version, especially given the superior presentation.