Tag Archives: Milestone

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.

Filibus (Milestone)

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Overall, Milestone’s presentation of Filibus (1915) on BD is very nice and free from restoration processing artifacts. However, it has some editing and mastering errors.

During the feature, there are three instances where a blank green image flashes on screen, as if the video tracks used for tinting the titles got misaligned. They occur at 21:57, 25:38, and 25:48, shown below:

I appreciate the new English intertitles and the attempt to emulate the look of film, complete with grain and cement splice jumps.

An easy-to-miss error happens at the very end. The last frame is mistakenly placed at the beginning of the final shot (frame numbers in yellow):

The bonus films included on the BD are hard subbed. Hard subs are always disappointing, but if you’re going to use them, the safe area still matters:

Hard subtitles from the “Filibus” BD as seen on a Sony 34XBR960.

I watched it with the fine Mont Alto score, but I recommend listening to Donald Sosin’s with Joanna Seaton’s vocals first. Sosin wrote a delightful theme song that fits the pulpy and slightly goofy film wonderfully.

Filibus is transferred at 18 fps and encoded at 24 fps. Its intertitles run at 24 fps.