Tag Archives: Interpolation

Carmen (1918, Kino)

The Murnau Foundation put a ton of work into piecing the film back together. Then they had to go and blow two years of work by “restoring” it.

Editing errors

Carmen was reconstructed from multiple prints. Many, many gaps were filled in from lesser sources, often no more than a few frames. However, the technicians were a little sloppy, repeating frames they already had, resulting in added stutter, microloops, and reduced picture quality.

In this sample, the technicians appended three frames to the end of the shot. Two of the frames were already present, resulting in a microloop:

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The Unknown (1927, Criterion)

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Broken frame rate

Criterion transferred The Unknown at a little under 23fps and encoded at 1080i. The motion should be perfect, right? Wrong! Somebody messed up and used a 24fps timeline, then exported at 1080i60. Notice how the motion stutters in the top sample below. The whole reason to use 1080i is to prevent that!

After deinterlacing, we can easily see the uneven, broken pulldown, worse than most silents authored at 24fps. Below screenshot is of a tool I wrote to help delete duplicated frames. What you see on the right is a long list of frame numbers. All frames highlighted in red are duplicates and can be safely deleted.

Encoding silents to 1080i60 applies its own unusual pulldown. So, the result of working in 24fps and exporting at 1080i60 is that two different pulldown patterns compounded to create terrible stuttering.

Poor retouching

Frozen cloning doesn’t match:

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Mobile Suit Gundam (1979, Right Stuf)

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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.