Tag Archives: Grain

Fantasia (1990 version)

Later versions of Fantasia (1940) are more accurate in terms of the ordering and amount of footage, which I like, but the 1990 version is perhaps the version I like best. This is what the New Beverly Cinema runs in 35mm, and I’ve been lucky to see it several times now, including this afternoon.

The negatives were manually cleaned and then photochemically copied. Without any computer processing, the 1990 version, on LD/VHS, is probably closest to what the film actually looks like, including grain, cel dust, and other beautiful flaws as a result of being made by hand under intense pressure. The 2000 version, on DVD, compares favorably, but Corey Burton replacing Deems Taylor’s voice is hard to swallow. I don’t understand why Disney, of all companies, didn’t hire a soundalike. After all, they did it for Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971). The 2010 version, on BD, is de-grained, stabilized, cleaned, and de-flickered to death, in addition to being subjected to Disney’s terrible color grading. Avoid it.

The 2010 version smooths out what I consider the most thrilling part of the film: Ave Maria. In earlier versions, it flickers and shakes like crazy, giving the feeling that this whole audacious undertaking could fall apart at any frame, which, needing a fourth take and completed a day before premiering, it almost did. It’s a dreamy, breathtaking artifact of imperfection, but the ’10 de-flickered it away.

The ’90 also did the best censoring of Pastoral Symphony. Let’s face it, Disney is not going to show this uncut, so the quality of the censoring matters. The ’90 uses crops and pans. If you didn’t know it was censored, you wouldn’t know (and, indeed, I didn’t for the longest time). The ’00 crops more aggressively (it remains the largest grain I’ve ever seen), then goes further and erases Atika and Sunflower, reducing the frequency of cropping. The ’10 does more of the same, but in an unforgivable move, repeats a shot two seconds after it ran. When I watched the BD and saw this, I thought I lost my mind and had to stop the disc and check.

In one of their best series, all projected on film, LACMA (RIP) ran an incredible print of the ’00. That was nearly 25 years ago. I may still conclude that the ’90 is a better representation of Fantasia, but I would love to see this version in 35mm again.

Mobile Suit Gundam (1979, Right Stuf)

Leave a reply

Grain Removal

De-grained by Q-Tec. The de-graining itself is kind of impressive. It leaves a significant amount of cel dust, film dirt, and doesn’t really destroy lines. In a way, it’s less destructive than many “faithful” restorations.

However, Q-Tec failed to de-grain every frame. For almost every shot, the first and last frames have intact grain. Shots begin with grain, but then melt into smeariness. It’s as if it constantly goes in and out of focus. Going from grain to no-grain also looks a lot like interpolation.

Continue reading →

Burden of Dreams (Criterion)

Leave a reply

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.

Le Beau Mec (Altered Innocence)

Leave a reply

Opening titles are very blurry and smoothed, as if de-grained and filtered to death. However, the video soon clears up and is generally very nice all the way to the end.

Clipped directly from the BD.

The notes say that the primary source is the original reversal negative, which looks like it could benefit from more physical cleaning. I’m fine with dirt, but there comes a point when I’m sitting in a theater watching a fine but dirty print, and I want to yell to its owner, “Clean your print!”

I complain, but I still prefer to see dirt instead of artifact-inducing temporal cloning.

There weren’t any repairs that made me stop the disc, but I did catch this spot where a frame was held for the duration of three extra frames:

Instead of freezing, I’d much prefer to edit the sound, see black frames inserted, or, best, see the original damaged frames.

Magic Crystal (Vinegar Syndrome)

Leave a reply

A light touch, but there’s so much damage, that it would’ve looked fine without any repairs. This is a bad restoration not because damage remains, but because the repairs are ugly, creating their own artifacts.

Interpolation:

Interpolated spot repair. These scenes are over an hour into the movie. Up to this point, I wasn’t even noticing repairs bad enough to take notes until large areas of grain suddenly started warping as if due to terrible compression: