While the processing wasn’t egregious enough to make any notes while watching, splices tended to be replaced by a combination of microloops, frozen temporal cloning, and interpolation. Still, a light hand overall.
(Frame number in yellow.)
Jackie Chan’s finger is stuck to the background and fine damage lasts an additional frame:
Taking a guess, it was de-grained, restored to death, then re-grained. It looks smeary and unnatural.
And check out those ugly grid lines!
Interpolation still shows under the layer of false grain.
Now, compare to Autour de la Fin du Monde (1930). There’s a clarity that comes through the softness when the picture is left alone:
Too bad it’s out of sync:
La fin du monde (1931) was processed by Gaumont, Eclair, and FPA France. This version is also available from 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.
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:
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.
Frozen cloning doesn’t match:
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.
