Tag Archives: Frame rate

Blood and Sand (Kino)

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.

The Valley of Silent Men (Undercrank)

Undercrank’s presentation of The Valley of Silent Men (1922) looks wonderful on BD. It looks like no computer restoration was inflicted on it. Just a good scan with good video encoding. I wish more silents were handled this way.

There’s just one thing, and it has to do with frame rate. It’s transferred at 21fps, and like almost all speed-corrected silents on BD, it’s encoded at 24fps, which introduces motion stutter, though I’m not going to discuss that systemic issue right now. What I want to point out is how the stills were processed.

Stills were used to fill in some of the gaps. Some of them have panning animation applied. However, this part of the work was done at 21fps, which means it stutters. By removing duplicate frames and encoding to 60fps, you can get smooth motion:

While 21fps is consistent with the rest of the presentation, the animation could have been done at a native 24. Why introduce stutter when you don’t have to?