Tag Archives: Interpolation

Devil’s Bride (1974, Deaf Crocodile)

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The technicians used interpolation in an attempt to remove all splices at each cut on the top of the frame:

And on the bottom:

Sometimes, retouching at the bottom doesn’t match at all, causing explicit screen tearing:

Retouching is so poor that the cement line is still present. Leave the flaw alone if you can’t do a flawless repair:

Frame blending on thrown grapes:

Full-frame interpolation. Not only is it ugly, at full speed, the picture appears to freeze:

See the mark that disappears in the upper-left corner? That’s part of the texture and supposed to be there:

Interpolation:

Interpolated spot repair propagates the scratch:

In motion, interpolation looks completely unnatural. Replacing one flaw with another is not an improvement.

Processed by Lithuanian Film Centre.

Edit 1/20/26 : The color looks absolutely bizarre. Is this really what it actually looks like? (I HAVE MY DOUBTS.)

Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers (Part 2)

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For part 1, click here.

Disc 2 is a lot better, but not without errors.

Hypocrites

Pulldown error. Corrected to 60fps.

Sunshine Molly

Pulldown error. Corrected to 60fps.

Too Wise Wives

Microloop. Clipped directly from the BD.
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Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers (Part 1)

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Kino’s set is a mixed bag. Some movies look great. Others are restored to death. I’ll be focusing on the latter. I give lots of examples, but this post is by no means comprehensive.

Mixed Pets (1911)

Editing error:

Corrected to 60fps

Frozen, splotchy, misaligned cloning. Terrible in every way:

Some shots are untouched, but frozen cloning is pervasive:

Intertitles look super fake, but this one has an erroneous line peeking through:

Processed by Library of Congress and Dayton Digital Filmworks.

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The U.S. and the Holocaust (PBS)

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“Approx. 6 hours,” says the back of the BD cover. Given that it’s made for TV, I took that to mean three episodes slightly under two hours each. WRONG. Each episode was well over two hours, totaling 400 minutes. That’s WAY over six hours! Knowing the accurate running time in advance is very important! This is easy to get right.

As to this blog’s obsessions, quality of archival footage is all over the place, but generally very good. However, since the video runs at 24fps, much of it stutters. Full-frame interpolation is common, along with occasional blurry motion. Working in 60fps would have been much better.

Magic Crystal (Vinegar Syndrome)

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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:

Hideous interpolated eyes.

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:

Frozen temporal cloning:

Opening and end credits use some other source, which looks like a recreation, de-grained and filtered to death. Check out that aliasing!

The included interviews use clips from this older, altered source. First, a sample from VS’s version:

Vinegar Syndrome BD

Now, this older version, clipped from the Wen Chao-Yu interview. No wires and no grain:

Previous release.

It could have been so much worse.