Tag Archives: Upscale

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:

Clipped directly from the BD. Also contains microloop.

Clipped directly from the BD.

The movie is encoded at 24fps, but transferred slightly slower, resulting in random whiplash-inducing stuttering.

A Straightforward Boy

Clipped directly from the BD.

Restoration work is horrible:

Frame numbers in yellow.

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:

Eolomea (Eureka)

It’s a bad sign when I pop in a disc, just to see how it looks, and find obtrusive repairs less than a minute after hitting play.

Just about every splice is accompanied by interpolation and freezing.

Interpolation:

Freezing:

Yellow numbers indicate frame number.

People are poorly rotoscoped (often with interpolation) against a frozen background.

Can you spot the misaligned repair?

I don’t understand why Eureka’s upscaling and interlace handling is so poor:

Eolomea Trailer

Jana and the Little Star (1971)

Live-action portions have magnetic grain and major macroblocking in the darks. Grain in the animation also tends to have a halting, dissolving quality.

Clipped directly from the BD.

Heart of Stone (1950, Eureka)

De-grained. There’s noise, but it doesn’t look natural.

Smeary. Dissolving damage. Frozen cloning. Screen tearing. Freeze-frames. Broken stabilization. Interpolation.

Clipped directly from the BD.

The broken stabilization is more apparent here:

Clipped directly from the BD.

And the shorts? All upscales.

Thumbelina’s Adventures (1958)