Tag Archives: Microloop

F. P. 1 Doesn’t Answer (Kino)

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Automated Spot Removal

Watch the spot remover make the plane disappear. IN THE VERY FIRST SHOT.

Clipped directly from the BD.

The damage done, let’s look closer at the retouching:

Watch pieces and small details of the plane disappear:

Clipped directly from the BD.

Disappearing porthole:

Disappearing wall fixture:

Disappearing wall decor on upper right:

Freezing

By far, the worst repair is freeze-framing the ends of shots. It’s hard to watch when the video keeps freezing. I consider it unwatchable. The bulk of it occurs during the first half, but never completely goes away. Check out the lousy spot removal here, too.

Frozen Temporal Cloning

Interpolation

Interpolation here is often combined with spot repair. It’s not the worst, but grain still freezes, dissolves, becomes magnetic; damage sticks to surfaces, and there’s ghosting. Click to see them full screen.

Maybe you think the previous three don’t look visible in motion:

Clipped directly from the BD.

But notice how parts of the picture slow down, as if they got stuck in the mud. Without knowing anything, it’s easy to dismiss it as poor encoding or a streaming hiccup. However, these are intentionally introduced errors.

Clipped directly from the BD.

There’s some microlooping, but surprisingly sparsely used.

Additionally, the subtitles have major timing issues.

The English version looks much better, even though it suffers from aggressive spot removal, some dodgy stabilization, and wobbly masking. However, there wasn’t anything that made me turn off the movie or pause it to take notes.

The Hands of Orlac (Eureka)

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Eureka’s BD of The Hands of Orlac (Orlacs Hände, 1924) has one of the most aggressive and inept restorations I’ve seen. Nearly every shot has restoration artifacts.

Be sure to click on the GIFs to see them full size.

Interpolation

The first and last frames of most shots are interpolated. Sometimes it looks like a duplicate pulldown frame. Other times, it introduces some serious distortions. Nearly every example in this section has frames that are completely computer-generated. Faked.

Conrad Veidt’s head stretches, Alexandra Sorina’s fingers split, grain and background warp, plus frozen temporal cloning at the top edge:

The pen is broken up and the rest of the frame is nearly frozen:

Stuck grain and warping throughout:

Hideous computer-generated teeth:

Not a freeze-frame, but interpolation:

Interpolation makes scratches stick to the image:

Here, interpolation is combined with spot removal. At first glance, it’s impressive. Look closer, and you can see that it leaves smudges in place of damage AND it leaves remnants behind:

Notice how the sheets of paper distort:

Here it’s combined with frame blending and frozen temporal cloning:

Interpolation utterly fails when it’s called upon to generate background, such as behind Veidt’s head. And check out his smashed head and hand:

Veidt’s hand becomes putty and merges with the sleeve. The sofa pulsates:

You can see magnetic scratches on the wall behind the now-breathing sofa:

I admit that it’s not always immediately apparent recognizing restoration artifacts on a small screen, but look how obvious it is here when displayed at a fraction of its full size! The man gets smashed. And that background…

Interpolation is combined with temporal cloning on the ceiling lamp and chairs on the left. They now bob up and down:

His body compresses and arm stretches, creating a second wrist. Yikes!

Veidt’s head smashes into an invisible curved ceiling:

Our villain’s fingertips disappear. The disembodied hand on the left is completely frozen:

Interpolation destroys the head:

An example of interpolation that is nearly a freeze-frame, plus some negligible spot removal:

The foot disappears:

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The Spanish Dancer (Milestone)

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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:

Editing error, followed by fixed version. Corrected to 60fps.

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.

Abraham Lincoln (1930, Kino)

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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.