Tag Archives: Silents

Carmen (1918, Kino)

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The Murnau Foundation put a ton of work into piecing the film back together. Then they had to go and blow two years of work by “restoring” it.

Editing errors

Carmen was reconstructed from multiple prints. Many, many gaps were filled in from lesser sources, often no more than a few frames. However, the technicians were a little sloppy, repeating frames they already had, resulting in added stutter, microloops, and reduced picture quality.

Frame number in yellow.

In this sample, the technicians appended three frames to the end of the shot. Two of the frames were already present, resulting in a microloop:

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The Unknown (1927, Criterion)

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Broken frame rate

Criterion transferred The Unknown at a little under 23fps and encoded at 1080i. The motion should be perfect, right? Wrong! Somebody messed up and used a 24fps timeline, then exported at 1080i60. Notice how the motion stutters in the top sample below. The whole reason to use 1080i is to prevent that!

After deinterlacing, we can easily see the uneven, broken pulldown, worse than most silents authored at 24fps. Below screenshot is of a tool I wrote to help delete duplicated frames. What you see on the right is a long list of frame numbers. All frames highlighted in red are duplicates and can be safely deleted.

Encoding silents to 1080i60 applies its own unusual pulldown. So, the result of working in 24fps and exporting at 1080i60 is that two different pulldown patterns compounded to create terrible stuttering.

Poor retouching

Frozen cloning doesn’t match:

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Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers (Part 2)

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For part 1, click here.

Disc 2 is a lot better, but not without errors.

Hypocrites

Pulldown error. Corrected to 60fps.

Sunshine Molly

Pulldown error. Corrected to 60fps.

Too Wise Wives

Microloop. Clipped directly from the BD.
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Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers (Part 1)

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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:

Corrected to 60fps

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.

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The U.S. and the Holocaust (PBS)

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“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.