Good grain, natural stabilization, nice grading, few noticeable processing artifacts. Overall good presentation of The Spanish Dancer (1923).
Clipped directly from the M2TS.
Alas, it has some errors.
Quick-reverse:
Quick-reverse on the left, fixed on the right. Both sides corrected to 60fps.
Mindless spot repair:
The full shot also combines frozen temporal cloning and quick-reversing, mostly on the left side. There’s still so much damage. They should’ve left it alone.
Quick-reversing, frozen temporal cloning, and workflow errors. Clipped directly from the M2TS.
Editing error at 47m43s, where eight frames repeat:
Editing error, followed by fixed version. Corrected to 60fps.
Bill Ware’s music is wonderful. It includes a light touch of sound effects, too, but…does every door have to squeak?
The Spanish Dancer is transferred at 18fps and encoded at 24fps with an uneven pulldown. Frequently, a frame gets repeated twice.
Kino’s BD of Blood and Sand (1922) has relatively little computer repair work done on it, but what there is, is sloppy.
The most common restoration artifact here is what I call “quick-reverse” (QR) frames. It is when, instead of the film advancing as a normal ABCDEFGH, frames repeat like ABCDCDEFGH. It gives a feeling of the movie seizing up and is ugly to see in motion. Here, it’s limited to some titles.
Above, you can see Kino’s original with QR frames compared with those frames removed (and encoded at 60fps). Kino also added an additional repeating four frames to pad the length, but in this case they are far enough away from their initial appearance than it doesn’t register as looping frames. If you must pad out the length by repeating frames, spacing them out to break our persistence of vision works ok. In my corrected example, I removed these, too.
However, video is capable of arbitrary frame rates. Just stretch the playback speed in the timeline.
Some ugly interpolation:
Above brightened to see detail
The remaining errors are mostly frozen temporal cloning. What follows are some of the worst.
Top third of frame is frozen.Top of frame is frozen and has an obvious seam.Retouched area is a frozen splotch that doesn’t match.Detail of above splotch.Frozen splotch at top right.Detail of above splotch.
Notice how the frozen temporal cloning above is misaligned and has a blurry edge. The technician needs to align it and use a harder brush and choose an indistinct source frame far enough away that it doesn’t result in either frozen or quick-reverse temporal cloning.
Top third of frame is frozen and misaligned.
Two thirds of the above frame are frozen, including the boy, which is the one part of the frame that shouldn’t be frozen. This spot also coincides with the 24fps pulldown. The same frame is shown for a duration of three frames, which means this spot runs for the equivalent of six frames per second!
Deleting that mostly-frozen frame results in a tiny jump cut, but the technician created that jump when cloning the motion out of existence.
And an editing error at 1:02:51:
The source print has lots of damage, though it still looks good. The damage is not particularly bad, but it’s there and occasionally significant. I find it hard to believe that the damage covered by these sloppy repairs was worse than and intolerable in relation to the damage that remains.
Blood and Sand is transferred at 19fps and encoded at 24fps.
PS: I would love a better word to describe quick-reverse frames.
