Like The Valley of Silent Men on the first disc of the set, Back Pay (1922) looks like an as-is presentation. Natural grain, no obvious restoration processing, nice encoding. It looks wonderful.
Back Pay is transferred at 21fps and encoded at 24fps. Too stuttery, but as good as it’s gonna get in our 24fps-or-nothing world.
Good grain, natural stabilization, nice grading, few noticeable processing artifacts. Overall good presentation of The Spanish Dancer (1923).
Alas, it has some errors.
Quick-reverse:
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.
Editing error at 47m43s, where eight frames repeat:
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.
Flicker Alley’s presentation of Mother (1926) is a bit of a throwback to when silents were released on home video with whatever print the distributor happened to own. Nowadays, with so many movies getting processed to death, it’s jarring to see a major silent presented as-is from a well-worn print. Still, the transfer is nice. Natural grain, no major compression issues, and most importantly, no restoration artifacts.
As you can see, it’s rough, but it’s nicely encoded. I suppose it could be processed with new grading and stabilization, but it’s so easy to be heavy-handed, that I think I’d prefer this. Besides, it’s clearly not first-generation material, so what’s the point?
The End of St. Petersburg (1927), also well-worn, derives from Mosfilm’s 1969 restoration. It runs at a variable frame rate, primarily 24fps (most of the time) and 18fps, step-printed in 1969. I wonder about the accuracy of this. 18fps makes sense for slower scenes in the first half, but the dips in speed are drastic and inconsistently applied as the action and editing get faster in the climax.
FA’s transfer has further stretching that results in random single frames being duplicated, mostly in the second half. Many of these are easy to miss amid the frantic action. However, it’s another nice encode.
When Mosfilm step-printed in 1969, they introduced a lot of debris. You can see this when frames get repeated; you end up with the same image getting completely different layers of dirt and different exposures. They also introduced gate weaving and occasional out-of-focus frames (at splices). By undoing their step-printing, we can get non-destructive repair:
The difference is slight, but the right side is a little cleaner and gate weave is more natural and less…slippery. It may not be noticeable in this short clip, but over the course of the movie, and on a big screen, the 1969 step-printing defects are visible.
I am very curious what original material actually exists and its condition. Alas, Ukraine. Oh, well…
Mother is transferred at 20fps and encoded at 24fps. The End of St. Petersburg is transferred with a variable frame rate, 8-24fps, and encoded at 24fps.
Overall, very nice picture quality. Good grain, looks natural.
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:
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.
Two BD releases of The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923), both riddled with restoration artifacts.
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.
Also frequent is frozen temporal cloning:
The next three examples each have multiple instances of frozen temporal cloning:
Sloppy retouching:
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.
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:
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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