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:
Microloops galore. Nearly every shot begins with a microloop. Microloops frequently occur mid-shot, too. Duplicated frames are separated by one or two frames, never breaking persistence of vision. You won’t see them all, but you’ll definitely notice some of the ones that happen mid-shot. They are very hard to demonstrate. In these samples, I put the repeated frames next to each other, with the frame number on top, so you can see that these are the exact same frames.
Frozen cloning isn’t a huge issue, but it still happens, and it’s crude and ugly as sin:
My complaints with this interesting re-working are solely on technical issues (though no one should call this a restoration, ever).
Pulldown issues. Stuttering, like a speed-corrected silent encoded at 24 fps…
…and dropped frames, like a poor PAL-NTSC conversion:
Intertitle that loops a handful of frames for its duration. I hate it in new versions of silents, and it definitely shouldn’t happen when an artist has complete control on reworking an old work (still image sample):
In contrast to the feature, the two shorts look great. I didn’t see any restoration artifacts when spot-checking, whereas I came across multiple artifacts at every spot I looked at in The Tune.
About the disc itself…
I hate fancy disc menus. The BD menu has a short loop FROM THE CLIMAX of the film that plays over the entire menu. Heaven forbid you need more than a few seconds to make a selection. I rushed for the mute button.
Zoom shit:
I don’t care how interesting the interviews are, I’m not watching Zoom meetings. They’re low-effort and look like garbage. Look at that screenshot. They didn’t even agree on horizontal or vertical. Yeah, low budget, blah, blah. But you could, like, you know, EDIT. And FRAME. And CROP. We don’t need to watch a 10 GB hour-long video of this.
The Tune, Your Face, and Guard Dog were processed by Academy Film Archive.
For part 1, click here.
Disc 2 is a lot better, but not without errors.
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.
Editing error:
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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