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.
Frame number in yellow.
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:
The Flying House – Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend
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…
Frame number in yellow.
…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):
Your Face / Guard Dog
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.
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.
Dammit, another upscale from Criterion! They are inconsistent in publishing bonus features and alternate versions in HD, and they never state on the box when they upscale. I even checked Blu-ray.com and DVDBeaver before buying (both said 1080p).
Screenshots make it look ok, but in motion, the aliased deinterlacing and DVD-era artifacting is obvious:
Clipped directly from the BD. Also contains microloop.Clipped directly from the BD.
The movie is encoded at 24fps, but transferred slightly slower, resulting in random whiplash-inducing stuttering.
A Straightforward Boy
Clipped directly from the BD.
Restoration work is horrible:
Frame numbers in yellow.
Frozen temporal cloning looks terrible in motion. The pause in this video clip is due to the broken pulldown, not an error on my end:
