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.
Looks amazing! Clear and sharp, with wonderful grain and a generous bitrate.
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.
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:
Very nice color scan of a tinted print. In rough shape, but grain looks natural and no restoration artifacting. No complaints about the encoding. Looks great!
I already had the Eureka release of The Oyster Princess (1919), so I didn’t watch Kino’s encode, but it has the same wonderful score.
Meyer from Berlin (1919) is transferred at 18fps and encoded at 24fps. From EYE Filmmuseum.
Some pretty ugly repairs-frozen cloning, interpolation, microloops-but they’re not pervasive. For the most part, though, it’s not excessively processed. Grain is intact and it looks ok. Given that the final result still has lots of damage, the repairs were a waste of effort.
Misaligned, frozen cloning:
Wall texture retouched to oblivion:
Nearly a freeze frame:
Interpolation and disappearing rope:
Madame Dubarry is transferred mostly at 20fps and encoded at 24fps.
The 2012 restoration of Wings (1927) is a mixed bag. The color work is beautiful. Ben Burtt’s sound effects really work. However, that all goes to waste due to the overprocessing.
This weekend, the Vista is running a 35mm print of this version. It uses the new sound track, but the print is three seconds out of sync. All the things that were gnawing at me when I first watched the BD are visible in 35mm: frozen cloning, interpolation, microloops. and terrible grain. Grain varies from shot to shot, but, for the most part, it’s smeary.
I still dislike the new arrangement of J. S. Zamecnik’s score. Too cheery, with excessive chimes. The recording lacks so much personality, that I thought it was mostly electronic. I was shocked when I saw the credits. This is perhaps the largest American recording of a score for a silent in over 20 years! If only the studios put in half as much effort into their silents as Paramount did for Wings.