For part 1, click here.
Disc 2 is a lot better, but not without errors.
Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers (Part 2)
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Tag Archives: Temporal cloning
Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers (Part 1)
Kino’s set is a mixed bag. Some movies look great. Others are restored to death. I’ll be focusing on the latter. I give lots of examples, but this post is by no means comprehensive.
Mixed Pets (1911)
Editing error:
Frozen, splotchy, misaligned cloning. Terrible in every way:
Some shots are untouched, but frozen cloning is pervasive:
Intertitles look super fake, but this one has an erroneous line peeking through:
Processed by Library of Congress and Dayton Digital Filmworks.
Continue readingMagic Crystal (Vinegar Syndrome)
A light touch, but there’s so much damage, that it would’ve looked fine without any repairs. This is a bad restoration not because damage remains, but because the repairs are ugly, creating their own artifacts.
Interpolation:
Interpolated spot repair. These scenes are over an hour into the movie. Up to this point, I wasn’t even noticing repairs bad enough to take notes until large areas of grain suddenly started warping as if due to terrible compression:
Frozen temporal cloning:
Opening and end credits use some other source, which looks like a recreation, de-grained and filtered to death. Check out that aliasing!
The included interviews use clips from this older, altered source. First, a sample from VS’s version:
Now, this older version, clipped from the Wen Chao-Yu interview. No wires and no grain:
It could have been so much worse.
I Was Born, But… (Criterion)
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.
A Straightforward Boy
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:
Strange New Worlds: Science Fiction at DEFA (Eureka)
Processing on Eolomea (1972) was so bad that it deserved its own post. See here.
The Silent Star (1960)
I found a tiny bit of interpolated cloning while looking for a sample, but it’s minor. Looks good overall. The only feature in the set that didn’t have any jarring repairs.
Signals (1970)
Filtering leaves residue from previous frames:
Bad splice handling that uses Interpolation, microloops, and appalling pixelation. How is this better than visible cement splices (which are mostly masked out during film projection)?
General interpolation and misalignment:
In the Dust of the Stars (1976)
There’s some weird masking and screen tearing going on, but I can’t tell if it’s original. Overall ok.
Edit: Turns out, some of the weirdness I was noticing is AI upscaling dreck. Lots of examples in this thread at Blu-ray.com. Deaf Crocodile’s disc apparently is better. Maybe I’ll get it. Still…
Sloppy repairs are few, but present:
Love 2002 (1972)
Very rough, but natural.
Edit: Or is this also an AI upscale? I initially thought the source was 16mm, but those edges and the dull color is very suspicious.
The Robot (1968)
The best looking film in the set.
Pleasingly, the features aren’t overly scrubbed, which makes the repairs all the more frustrating. There are enough remaining flaws that no one would have noticed their presence had they been allowed to remain.
And a pet peeve: these features don’t have end credits, but DEFA added new end screens immediately upon fadeout, destroying what I consider a cool effect, akin to seeing a play without a curtain call. How often do you see movies without end credits?