Like The Valley of Silent Men on the first disc of the set, Back Pay (1922) looks like an as-is presentation. Natural grain, no obvious restoration processing, nice encoding. It looks wonderful.
Back Pay is transferred at 21fps and encoded at 24fps. Too stuttery, but as good as it’s gonna get in our 24fps-or-nothing world.
Undercrank’s presentation of The Valley of Silent Men (1922) looks wonderful on BD. It looks like no computer restoration was inflicted on it. Just a good scan with good video encoding. I wish more silents were handled this way.
There’s just one thing, and it has to do with frame rate. It’s transferred at 21fps, and like almost all speed-corrected silents on BD, it’s encoded at 24fps, which introduces motion stutter, though I’m not going to discuss that systemic issue right now. What I want to point out is how the stills were processed.
Stills were used to fill in some of the gaps. Some of them have panning animation applied. However, this part of the work was done at 21fps, which means it stutters. By removing duplicate frames and encoding to 60fps, you can get smooth motion:
While 21fps is consistent with the rest of the presentation, the animation could have been done at a native 24. Why introduce stutter when you don’t have to?