Tag Archives: Silents

Wings (1927)

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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.

Clipped directly from the BD. Check out that magnetic grain!
Clipped directly from the BD.
Huge smeary retouching.

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.

Storm Over Asia (Flicker Alley)

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Two main issues: broken pulldown and microloops. The source print is step-printed and the video was stretched further for the BD, resulting in a very clumpy pulldown. You can see the strobing at the climax is completely broken.

BD on left; corrected to 60fps on right.

The elements are there for a good presentation. Nice scan, nice encoding, no artifacting, but the technicians didn’t make the effort to fix the pulldown, even taking into consideration that they stretched to 24fps.

Microloops at

  • 00;46;49;38
  • 00;26;47;01
  • 00;36;06;55
  • 02;05;56;20

The source looks like a circulating repertory print with characteristic dirt buildup. I’m puzzled why Flicker Alley didn’t physically clean it before scanning.

Storm Over Asia runs at 6-24fps and is encoded at 24fps. The included Chess Fever is upscaled.

The Eagle (1925, Kino)

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Clipped directly from the BD.

I didn’t notice any restoration artifacting. It looks like it didn’t have any restoration processing, which is good! There is wear throughout, but it’s not an issue. Everything looks natural. Video encoding is very nice. Transferred and encoded at 24fps, so motion is perfect. A wonderful as-is presentation.

The Kid Brother (Criterion)

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L’Immagine Ritrovata did this restoration of The Kid Brother (1927). Compared to some of their other work, they used a light touch this time. However, they used interpolation, and I consider even a single instance too much. On the whole, though, it looks ok, if suspiciously clean.

Clipped directly from the BD.

Interpolation at the bottom:

Fully faked frame. It’s easy to tell which one by how ragged it looks:

Interpolation is subtle here, but view this full size, and you can see how it destroys vertical lines and fine fabric patterns:

On the other hand, the shorts have fantastic presentations. Looks like basic transfers, tasteful stabilization, with no obvious processing artifacts. Best of all, they’re encoded at 1080i to accommodate the slower frame rate, meaning the motion is perfect!

(Downscaling does no favors for interlacing. Expand the following clips to full screen, and they’ll look much better. TVs display interlacing just fine.)

Over the Fence (1917). Clipped directly from the BD.
That’s Him!… (1918). Clipped directly from the BD.

The Kid Brother is transferred at 24fps. Gaylord Carter’s organ score is wonderful, as are many of the supplements. Skip the uninformative commentary, unless you like listening to people describe what’s happening on screen. I still prefer seeing one of UCLA’s 35mm prints.