Tag Archives: Grain

Eolomea (Eureka)

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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:

Yellow numbers indicate frame number.

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:

Eolomea Trailer

Jana and the Little Star (1971)

Live-action portions have magnetic grain and major macroblocking in the darks. Grain in the animation also tends to have a halting, dissolving quality.

Clipped directly from the BD.

Heart of Stone (1950, Eureka)

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De-grained. There’s noise, but it doesn’t look natural.

Smeary. Dissolving damage. Frozen cloning. Screen tearing. Freeze-frames. Broken stabilization. Interpolation.

Clipped directly from the BD.

The broken stabilization is more apparent here:

Clipped directly from the BD.

And the shorts? All upscales.

Thumbelina’s Adventures (1958)

Wings (1927)

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The 2012 restoration of Wings (1927) is a mixed bag. The color work is beautiful. Ben Burtt’s sound effects really work. However, that all goes to waste due to the overprocessing.

This weekend, the Vista is running a 35mm print of this version. It uses the new sound track, but the print is three seconds out of sync. All the things that were gnawing at me when I first watched the BD are visible in 35mm: frozen cloning, interpolation, microloops. and terrible grain. Grain varies from shot to shot, but, for the most part, it’s smeary.

Clipped directly from the BD. Check out that magnetic grain!
Clipped directly from the BD.
Huge smeary retouching.

I still dislike the new arrangement of J. S. Zamecnik’s score. Too cheery, with excessive chimes. The recording lacks so much personality, that I thought it was mostly electronic. I was shocked when I saw the credits. This is perhaps the largest American recording of a score for a silent in over 20 years! If only the studios put in half as much effort into their silents as Paramount did for Wings.

The Blue Angel (Eureka)

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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.

English version. Clipped directly from the BD.
German version. Clipped directly from the BD.

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.