Tag Archives: Quick-reverse

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 M2TS.

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 M2TS.

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.

The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Flicker Alley, Universal)

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Two BD releases of The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923), both riddled with restoration artifacts.

Flicker Alley (FA)

I like that it’s a color scan of a tinted print, which allows the subtle, imperfect color variations inherent in the process. The tints on Universal’s version are recreated.

The most common artifact comes from either poor compression or automatic spot removal gone awry (I’m guessing the latter):

Most of the time they look like specks of dirt, but if you look closer, they are hard tiny blocks.

In addition to damaging the text, the spot removal left an ugly retouched line at the top.
Watch Norman Kerry’s beads disappear.
Text disappears.
Obliterated text.

Also frequent is frozen temporal cloning:

There’s almost nothing left of the “restored” frame.
The top of the image suffers from misaligned frozen cloning and messy retouching. Spot removal was applied after stretching to 24fps.
This piece of frozen cloning in the lower right lasts three frames.

The next three examples each have multiple instances of frozen temporal cloning:

Sloppy retouching:

The retouching at top is misaligned, has a hard edge, and doesn’t even remove the cement splice.

Quick-reverse temporal cloning:

Quick-reversing is when frames are repeated in the manner of ABCDCDEF. It’s often applied to entire frames. For this edition, Flicker Alley combined it with temporal cloning. It’s no better than frozen temporal cloning, as you can see the picture “seize up.” Maybe not all the time, but done enough times, you’ll start to notice something’s off.

The top of this frame repeats.
Misaligned, hard-edged, quick-reverse temporal cloning at top.
Quick-reversing is easy to spot when it’s applied to motion.

One thing I’ve heard in commentaries and interviews from the people that produce restorations is that these artifacts aren’t visible in motion. Well, up next, straight-from-the-disc at 21.5fps:

Pay attention to the horse at top right. Quick-reverse in action.

Stabilization:

Stabilization was applied relatively sparingly. I don’t particularly care for stabilized silents; they have a tendency to float and rotate around the center. Here is an egregious use of it:

Lon Chaney was in front of a wall, facing a camera locked to a tripod. Stabilization warps every bit of this shot.

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Blood and Sand (Kino)

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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.