Natural grain. No unnecessary processing, no artifacting. Occasional hard subs are lamentable, but looks great overall. From the Cinémathèque de Toulouse.
Strike runs at 19fps and is encoded at 24fps. New English video intertitles.
Watch the spot remover make the plane disappear. IN THE VERY FIRST SHOT.
The damage done, let’s look closer at the retouching:
Watch pieces and small details of the plane disappear:
Disappearing porthole:
Disappearing wall fixture:
Disappearing wall decor on upper right:
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.
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:
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.
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.
Click here for the first movie in the set.
For a 2013 movie, I expected this to look better. My guess is an inadequate camera. Look at that aliasing!
The running time is 141 minutes, not the 134 stated on the box.
The first movie in the set that looks good.
However, the subtitles are horrible. There are typos throughout the set, but those for Invasion are the worst.
Another nice transfer.
These are probably fascinating in Farsi, but I was bored, and not having any of it by the time I got to Careless Crime. All the walking, monotonous dialog, and reading was just too taxing. I would be very interested to see Invasion, maybe even Fish & Cat, dubbed in English.
Good: Grain. Few obvious restoration artifacts. Customer service. Two of my discs were bad and Mill Creek sent replacements.
Bad: No original mono. The sweetened stereo remix is jarring, even when listening on headphones with a stereo-to-mono adapter.
The series is over-subtitled. Every word is subtitled, every time, including names. The first few times are ok, but it quickly gets annoying to see repeated things like names repeatedly pop up. “Jun-chan,” “Yuri-chan,” etc., over and over. I’m undecided about the use of honorifics, but if subtitles merely copy what’s being said, then they cease to be translation and instead turn into closed captioning.
The subtitles reach ridiculous lows near the end of the series. Episode 23 features characters speaking an obviously gibberish language. One of the characters is a translator. We’re clearly not supposed to understand the words.
Episode 27 features extended portions in English…which are subtitled:
Excessive subtitling robs us of the joy of viewing without words marring the picture and that we can understand the words being spoken. Subtitles are impossible to ignore and become a crutch. We look down and still read them, even when we can understand what’s spoken.
I didn’t really notice restoration artifacts overall. The transfer is clear, clean, and some damage remains throughout, which is ok. It looks nice and natural. Not suspiciously “pristine.”
However, episode 27 has a horrible stretch of frozen cloning and scratch removal. In the sample below, the first shot is splotchy, and then turns into a still. The left side of the following shots freeze up. The scratch removal left a smear. Play it at .25x and see how much you can spot:
I am not opposed to damage repair, but if attempted, it needs to be flawless. If it results in portions of the image freezing and smearing, then leave it alone. The watery scratch removal still left a scratch.
After that horrid repair, I was on high alert.
Interpolation:
How did I catch it? I wasn’t frame-stepping as if I was neurotic. I simply noticed that the picture seemed to freeze: