Tag Archives: Kino

Blood and Sand (Kino)

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Kino’s BD of Blood and Sand (1922) has relatively little computer repair work done on it, but what there is, is sloppy.

The most common restoration artifact here is what I call “quick-reverse” (QR) frames. It is when, instead of the film advancing as a normal ABCDEFGH, frames repeat like ABCDCDEFGH. It gives a feeling of the movie seizing up and is ugly to see in motion. Here, it’s limited to some titles.

Above, you can see Kino’s original with QR frames compared with those frames removed (and encoded at 60fps). Kino also added an additional repeating four frames to pad the length, but in this case they are far enough away from their initial appearance than it doesn’t register as looping frames. If you must pad out the length by repeating frames, spacing them out to break our persistence of vision works ok. In my corrected example, I removed these, too.

However, video is capable of arbitrary frame rates. Just stretch the playback speed in the timeline.

Some ugly interpolation:

Above brightened to see detail

The remaining errors are mostly frozen temporal cloning. What follows are some of the worst.

Top third of frame is frozen.
Top of frame is frozen and has an obvious seam.
Retouched area is a frozen splotch that doesn’t match.
Detail of above splotch.
Frozen splotch at top right.
Detail of above splotch.

Notice how the frozen temporal cloning above is misaligned and has a blurry edge. The technician needs to align it and use a harder brush and choose an indistinct source frame far enough away that it doesn’t result in either frozen or quick-reverse temporal cloning.

Top third of frame is frozen and misaligned.

Two thirds of the above frame are frozen, including the boy, which is the one part of the frame that shouldn’t be frozen. This spot also coincides with the 24fps pulldown. The same frame is shown for a duration of three frames, which means this spot runs for the equivalent of six frames per second!

Deleting that mostly-frozen frame results in a tiny jump cut, but the technician created that jump when cloning the motion out of existence.

And an editing error at 1:02:51:

The source print has lots of damage, though it still looks good. The damage is not particularly bad, but it’s there and occasionally significant. I find it hard to believe that the damage covered by these sloppy repairs was worse than and intolerable in relation to the damage that remains.

Blood and Sand is transferred at 19fps and encoded at 24fps.

PS: I would love a better word to describe quick-reverse frames.

Lights of Old Broadway (Kino)

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The worst, most egregious restoration processing happens four minutes into the movie. There is a major scratch that the technician unwisely attempted to eliminate. Instead, it looks like the picture is melting:

Use the controls to slow down playback and you can clearly make out how shoddy the repair work is.

Look at the background. Notice how interpolation makes the bricks move and distort. Temporal clone repairs are misaligned on the window. Damage that normally lasts one frame now dissolves over several. Grain is completely ruined.

The upper half of this frame is frozen and the seam is obvious.

A completely interpolated frame. These never look good and they never look natural in motion. Notice how dirt, scratches, and grain get interpolated.

Frozen temporal cloning. The retouched area doesn’t even match.

Interpolation obliterates Marion Davies’ hands. It also interpolates that giant hole on the upper-right window, thereby creating even more damage. It also has a tendency to move stationary objects, seen in the wall to the right of the center window at the bottom of the frame. That “oh-so-horrible” scratching is still there.

Frozen temporal cloning, the scourge of most modern restorations, seen here most clearly on the moving platform.

The top of the frame is frozen and slightly misaligned. Perhaps done to remove a cement splice, but the result is screen tearing, which looks like garbage.

Interpolation ruins every bit of this frame. Notice the distortion of Davies and the man as they pass each other. Around them, the background distorts. Half the face of the right-most man disappears. A scratch at the top is propagated. Grain seizes up. It would be better to have no frame than a faked frame.

There is more than one shoddy repair in the above clip, but I’ll point out only one:

Frame interpolation should never be used.

Lights of Old Broadway is encoded at 24 fps. It is also transferred at 24, except for an inexplicable 20 seconds during the parade scene, when it switches to a stuttery variable frame rate.