Good grain, natural stabilization, nice grading, few noticeable processing artifacts. Overall good presentation of The Spanish Dancer (1923).
Clipped directly from the M2TS.
Alas, it has some errors.
Quick-reverse:
Quick-reverse on the left, fixed on the right. Both sides corrected to 60fps.
Mindless spot repair:
The full shot also combines frozen temporal cloning and quick-reversing, mostly on the left side. There’s still so much damage. They should’ve left it alone.
Quick-reversing, frozen temporal cloning, and workflow errors. Clipped directly from the M2TS.
Editing error at 47m43s, where eight frames repeat:
Bill Ware’s music is wonderful. It includes a light touch of sound effects, too, but…does every door have to squeak?
The Spanish Dancer is transferred at 18fps and encoded at 24fps with an uneven pulldown. Frequently, a frame gets repeated twice.
Overall, very nice picture quality. Good grain, looks natural.
Clipped directly from the BD.
However, the 2.0 LPCM sound decodes as surround, not mono. It’s easy to fix, but something that should’ve been caught before the disc was released.
The restoration was also pretty good. I wasn’t noticing any obvious processing artifacts, until, at 1h24m:
Clipped directly from the BD.
Sloppy, 3-frame, quick-reversed, misaligned changeover cue removal (but only one of them). I don’t get the hatred for changeover cues. You’d see them if you went to a screening of a print. They are authentic and accurate. If all that exists has cues, then that’s okay. Leave them alone, especially when the retouching isn’t flawless and invisible.
This was the only restoration artifact I noticed. I’m sure there were more, but they didn’t stick out like this one.
The improper surround sound, though, was a serious error.
After finishing Ashkan, the Charmed Ring and Other Stories, I popped in the disc of A Holy Place (Sveto mesto, 1990), and, by damn, it has the same frame rate problem!
Clipped directly from the BD.
Just like with Ashkan, it drops a frame every second. What a waste of a beautiful transfer of a lightly-worn print.
[Ashkan] was shot on video at 25 frames per second. [This version was converted to 24fps] by removing 1 frame per second from the movie.
I initially misread that as “one frame per shot,” which would have been no big deal. So, to see such choppiness really caught me off guard:
Clipped directly from the BD.
It’s really noticeable and distracting throughout the movie, though the hand-held shaky cam helped hide some of it.
If this is the best version, I have some questions. Why couldn’t the 25fps original be used? Does it still exist? The video that remains is basically slowed down; slowing the original down to 24fps would be effectively the same. Why couldn’t it be a 25fps->1080i60 conversion? What about the sound? Is it slowed or pitch-corrected?
I’m not thrilled with the video compression, but it could be worse:
Clipped directly from the BD.
A poor presentation. Whatever the price is for this four-disc set, it’s 25% too much.
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.
