Tag Archives: Spot removal

F. P. 1 Doesn’t Answer (Kino)

Automated Spot Removal

Watch the spot remover make the plane disappear. IN THE VERY FIRST SHOT.

Clipped directly from the BD.

The damage done, let’s look closer at the retouching:

Watch pieces and small details of the plane disappear:

Clipped directly from the BD.

Disappearing porthole:

Disappearing wall fixture:

Disappearing wall decor on upper right:

Freezing

By far, the worst repair is freeze-framing the ends of shots. It’s hard to watch when the video keeps freezing. I consider it unwatchable. The bulk of it occurs during the first half, but never completely goes away. Check out the lousy spot removal here, too.

Frozen Temporal Cloning

Interpolation

Interpolation here is often combined with spot repair. It’s not the worst, but grain still freezes, dissolves, becomes magnetic; damage sticks to surfaces, and there’s ghosting. Click to see them full screen.

Maybe you think the previous three don’t look visible in motion:

Clipped directly from the BD.

But notice how parts of the picture slow down, as if they got stuck in the mud. Without knowing anything, it’s easy to dismiss it as poor encoding or a streaming hiccup. However, these are intentionally introduced errors.

Clipped directly from the BD.

There’s some microlooping, but surprisingly sparsely used.

Additionally, the subtitles have major timing issues.

The English version looks much better, even though it suffers from aggressive spot removal, some dodgy stabilization, and wobbly masking. However, there wasn’t anything that made me turn off the movie or pause it to take notes.

The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Flicker Alley, Universal)

Two BD releases of The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923), both riddled with restoration artifacts.

Flicker Alley (FA)

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.

In addition to damaging the text, the spot removal left an ugly retouched line at the top.
Watch Norman Kerry’s beads disappear.
Text disappears.
Obliterated text.

Also frequent is frozen temporal cloning:

There’s almost nothing left of the “restored” frame.
The top of the image suffers from misaligned frozen cloning and messy retouching. Spot removal was applied after stretching to 24fps.
This piece of frozen cloning in the lower right lasts three frames.

The next three examples each have multiple instances of frozen temporal cloning:

Sloppy retouching:

The retouching at top is misaligned, has a hard edge, and doesn’t even remove the cement splice.

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.

The top of this frame repeats.
Misaligned, hard-edged, quick-reverse temporal cloning at top.
Quick-reversing is easy to spot when it’s applied to motion.

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:

Pay attention to the horse at top right. Quick-reverse in action.

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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