Tag Archives: Mastering Errors

Strange New Worlds: Science Fiction at DEFA (Eureka)

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Processing on Eolomea (1972) was so bad that it deserved its own post. See here.

The Silent Star (1960)

I found a tiny bit of interpolated cloning while looking for a sample, but it’s minor. Looks good overall. The only feature in the set that didn’t have any jarring repairs.

Clipped directly from the BD.

Signals (1970)

Filtering leaves residue from previous frames:

Bad splice handling that uses Interpolation, microloops, and appalling pixelation. How is this better than visible cement splices (which are mostly masked out during film projection)?

Frame numbers in yellow.

General interpolation and misalignment:

In the Dust of the Stars (1976)

There’s some weird masking and screen tearing going on, but I can’t tell if it’s original. Overall ok.

Edit: Turns out, some of the weirdness I was noticing is AI upscaling dreck. Lots of examples in this thread at Blu-ray.com. Deaf Crocodile’s disc apparently is better. Maybe I’ll get it. Still…

Sloppy repairs are few, but present:

Frame numbers in yellow.

Love 2002 (1972)

Very rough, but natural.

Edit: Or is this also an AI upscale? I initially thought the source was 16mm, but those edges and the dull color is very suspicious.

Clipped directly from the BD.

The Robot (1968)

The best looking film in the set.

Clipped directly from the BD.

Pleasingly, the features aren’t overly scrubbed, which makes the repairs all the more frustrating. There are enough remaining flaws that no one would have noticed their presence had they been allowed to remain.

And a pet peeve: these features don’t have end credits, but DEFA added new end screens immediately upon fadeout, destroying what I consider a cool effect, akin to seeing a play without a curtain call. How often do you see movies without end credits?

EDIT 11/17/25 – I just got the Deaf Crocodile release and did a quick spot check. Signals actually looks like 70mm this time, as opposed to Eureka’s grainy 2.35:1. In the Dust of the Stars is the same bad restoration. Grain is poor, looking like video noise. De-graining is frequent.

Eolomea (Eureka)

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It’s a bad sign when I pop in a disc, just to see how it looks, and find obtrusive repairs less than a minute after hitting play.

Just about every splice is accompanied by interpolation and freezing.

Interpolation:

Freezing:

Yellow numbers indicate frame number.

People are poorly rotoscoped (often with interpolation) against a frozen background.

Can you spot the misaligned repair?

I don’t understand why Eureka’s upscaling and interlace handling is so poor:

Eolomea Trailer

Jana and the Little Star (1971)

Live-action portions have magnetic grain and major macroblocking in the darks. Grain in the animation also tends to have a halting, dissolving quality.

Clipped directly from the BD.

Benny’s Bathtub (Deaf Crocodile)

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Deaf Crocodile’s BD of Benny’s Bathtub (1971) does not have a proper subtitle track, only closed captioning:

Typos:

Poor placement:

Additionally, the timing is poor. Lines appear too early, stay too long, and overlap dialog. All this makes following the movie very difficult.

The included episodes of Cirkleen suffer from the same subtitle problems.

Video quality, though, is very nice.

Storm Over Asia (Flicker Alley)

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Two main issues: broken pulldown and microloops. The source print is step-printed and the video was stretched further for the BD, resulting in a very clumpy pulldown. You can see the strobing at the climax is completely broken.

BD on left; corrected to 60fps on right.

The elements are there for a good presentation. Nice scan, nice encoding, no artifacting, but the technicians didn’t make the effort to fix the pulldown, even taking into consideration that they stretched to 24fps.

Microloops at

  • 00;46;49;38
  • 00;26;47;01
  • 00;36;06;55
  • 02;05;56;20

The source looks like a circulating repertory print with characteristic dirt buildup. I’m puzzled why Flicker Alley didn’t physically clean it before scanning.

Storm Over Asia runs at 6-24fps and is encoded at 24fps. The included Chess Fever is upscaled.

The Time Bending Mysteries of Shahram Mokri (Deaf Crocodile)

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Click here for the first movie in the set.

Fish & Cat (2013)

For a 2013 movie, I expected this to look better. My guess is an inadequate camera. Look at that aliasing!

Clipped directly from the BD.

The running time is 141 minutes, not the 134 stated on the box.

Invasion (2017)

The first movie in the set that looks good.

Clipped directly from the BD.

However, the subtitles are horrible. There are typos throughout the set, but those for Invasion are the worst.

Later spelled “Daniel.”
Plus inconsistent placement of quotation marks.

Careless Crime (2020)

Another nice transfer.

Clipped directly from the BD.

These are probably fascinating in Farsi, but I was bored, and not having any of it by the time I got to Careless Crime. All the walking, monotonous dialog, and reading was just too taxing. I would be very interested to see Invasion, maybe even Fish & Cat, dubbed in English.