For part 1, click here.
Disc 2 is a lot better, but not without errors.
Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers (Part 2)
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Tag Archives: Silents
Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers (Part 1)
Kino’s set is a mixed bag. Some movies look great. Others are restored to death. I’ll be focusing on the latter. I give lots of examples, but this post is by no means comprehensive.
Mixed Pets (1911)
Editing error:
Frozen, splotchy, misaligned cloning. Terrible in every way:
Some shots are untouched, but frozen cloning is pervasive:
Intertitles look super fake, but this one has an erroneous line peeking through:
Processed by Library of Congress and Dayton Digital Filmworks.
Continue readingThe U.S. and the Holocaust (PBS)
“Approx. 6 hours,” says the back of the BD cover. Given that it’s made for TV, I took that to mean three episodes slightly under two hours each. WRONG. Each episode was well over two hours, totaling 400 minutes. That’s WAY over six hours! Knowing the accurate running time in advance is very important! This is easy to get right.
As to this blog’s obsessions, quality of archival footage is all over the place, but generally very good. However, since the video runs at 24fps, much of it stutters. Full-frame interpolation is common, along with occasional blurry motion. Working in 60fps would have been much better.
The Mikado (1939, Criterion)
According to the booklet, Criterion applied DVNR for grain reduction and they did their typical hiss reduction. Regrettable, but their work doesn’t have distracting repairs and looks natural overall.
1926 Promo
Looks amazing! Clear and sharp, with wonderful grain and a generous bitrate.
I Was Born, But… (Criterion)
Dammit, another upscale from Criterion! They are inconsistent in publishing bonus features and alternate versions in HD, and they never state on the box when they upscale. I even checked Blu-ray.com and DVDBeaver before buying (both said 1080p).
Screenshots make it look ok, but in motion, the aliased deinterlacing and DVD-era artifacting is obvious:
The movie is encoded at 24fps, but transferred slightly slower, resulting in random whiplash-inducing stuttering.
A Straightforward Boy
Restoration work is horrible:
Frozen temporal cloning looks terrible in motion. The pause in this video clip is due to the broken pulldown, not an error on my end: