Tweet THE LOST WORLD (1925) - new restoration?

There are exceptions. Melies' Moon sucks with that awful modern score and so does Variete. But I actually like the Wm Burroughs narration and synth music on Haxxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages.

Glad that confusion on the Alloy score is cleared up. I doubted that they would add something for a repressing. After all, Flicker Alley never even bothered to correct the out of sync music on the Chaplin Mutuals.

There are exceptions. Melies' Moon sucks with that awful modern score and so does Variete. But I actually like the Wm Burroughs narration and synth music on Haxxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages.

Glad that confusion on the Alloy score is cleared up. I doubted that they would add something for a repressing. After all, Flicker Alley never even bothered to correct the out of sync music on the Chaplin Mutuals.

Excellent point about exceptions, and yeah, I intensely dislike the Melies' Moon score as well.

There are times when I wish a bit more common sense was applied to scoring silent releases. Since tastes vary, alternate soundtracks should be a more common bonus feature whenever production budgets stretch that far. If not, the distributor should go the extra mile in acquiring a score that fits the film and satisfies the vast majority of silent film fans.

When I saw Man With a Camera at The SFSFF some years ago, the Alloy Orchestra performed live accompaniment. Ken's avant garde score for that film is the only music I can imagine with that film. Each silent film has it's own special zeitgeist.

[Mike Gebert]

Well, as the late David Shepard once pointed out, Japanese TV pays for most of these releases, so they get what they like. If you also get what you like, lucky you.

For someone who had lived only one lifetime, David was a wise man!

...David was a wise man!

Very true!

Well, as the late David Shepard once pointed out, Japanese TV pays for most of these releases, so they get what they like. If you also get what you like, lucky you.

Good point, Mike. David Shepherd was a realist, but I'm not sure he was suggesting that silent film fans just resign themselves to their taste in music taking a back seat to TV broadcast revenue. Granted, we should all be grateful that the Japanese market for silent films is strong, but in restoring & releasing silent films for the home market traditional silent film music should never be dropped in favor of an unconventionally modern score if there's room for both on a disc format.

I wonder if it was the Japanese who wanted the Chaplin Mutuals and Phantom of the Opera to be out of sync with the music?

Well, as the late David Shepard once pointed out, Japanese TV pays for most of these releases, so they get what they like. If you also get what you like, lucky you.

Well, that's cool and all, but we can still call a shitball music score out for what it is, thanks.

At least you can push the mute button. Here in Los Angeles, Cliff Retallick has taken over nearly every regular silent screening at all the theaters, and he's TERRIBLE.

[silentfilm]

If you want notoriously bad scoring efforts, here's one that's at the bottom of my list:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=42&v=spzB-75gu7Y



A theatre in the middle of Michigan's lower peninsula used to have live silent film screenings and would always pick these guys to play the film - I had heard this 'score' already so knew to keep away but it's tough to have to forego a live silent film screening.

Well, as the late David Shepard once pointed out, Japanese TV pays for most of these releases, so they get what they like. If you also get what you like, lucky you.

Well, that's cool and all, but we can still call a shitball music score out for what it is, thanks.

Fortunately, Robert Israel's score for The Lost World score fits well. I wouldn't have minded a secondary soundtrack ...Alloy Orchestra, for instance... had Flicker Alley chosen to include it. Visually, it's a stunning release flaws & all, ...my wife poking fun at "claymation" dinosaurs notwithstanding.

Generally, this restoration is an excellent release with modest nitpicks (the judgment call of replaceing period dialogue cards). Perhaps some future restoration of The Lost World may improve on this ambitious effort through discovery of intact low generation 35mm footage to replace the cobbled together elements of varying quality in this presentation. Until that time though, this is a superb upgrade from earlier releases.

I guess that one will cost $70.

I guess that one will cost $70.

At that price I'd hope for a pristine 35 mm low generation or camera negative source, complete, untinkered with, loaded with bonus features including new documentary material. I'm not averse to steep pricing, but I do expect significant value-added extras & PQ upgrade.

Rewind.

Sorry I am mistaken. Alloy's score is not on the new Lost World Restoration (from David Shepard and Flicker Alley).

Flicker Alley is also selling David Shepard's previous DVD restoration of Lost World, with Alloy's score. As a MOD (manufacture on demand).

The Alloy score was available long ago in the 2001 DVD edition, which can be had for $2-3 at Amazon. Those Flicker Alley MOD DVDs are sometimes not a good deal, as they offer no supplements and you can often buy the original discs cheaply from third parties.

[silentfilm]

I got the Flicker Alley Blu-ray release for Christmas and watched it that evening. I was extremely pleased with the picture quality, despite some areas with heavy scratching and a few bits that they had to insert 16mm for missing 35mm. I was surprised how well the picture flowed despite being 110 minutes long. I had not seen the film in over a decade and when I did it was probably the old 55 minute version.

I had read this thread a while before receiving my copy, so I was confused at some points. Then I re-read the thread again. No mention of the Alloy Orchestra score and the Conan Doyle footage taken from the Movietone print of him. (The full print and his speech can be found on Alloy's Gillette Sherlock Holmes Blu-ray). I was pleased that Zambo's speech was not recast in a more politically correct dialect, after all, the actor is playing him in blackface! Curiously, Zambo's arm in a sling is not explained, I assume he sustained an injury during the missing native attack scene. A still image of the original sequence with Conan Doyle (all that exists) has already been linked to above. The official original trailer should be this one :

I did notice judder, but ironically only during the digitally created restoration credits, which scroll vertically upwards. Vertically scrolling credits are an excellent way to demonstrate frame rate issues.

Wow, the included restoration of The Ghost of Slumber Mountain is terrible! It's severely cropped and had excessive motion-stabilization applied, looking like an unfortunate YouTube upload where the uploader checked the "stabilize image" box.

Spot-checking The Lost World, it's mastered at 24fps with a variable frame rate, with judder ranging from passable to whiplash-inducing.

In a stop motion film, judder is going to be part of it no matter how it's mastered. Especially an early stop motion film like this. Animation is usually shot 12 frames a second with every frame repeating.

There seems to be a fixation with the idea of judder. On another movie forum I saw a huge long thread about how judder was a serious flaw in a movie. The thread went on and on for a week discussing it. People argued over whether it was frame rate or negative shrinkage. There was even discussion of "natural 24fps judder", claiming that all 24fps movies have judder because 30fps is the minimum frame rate to be able to depict smooth action.

It was finally determined that the source of the "judder" was the fact that the shot had some footstep bumps in a handheld camera shot.

Watched this last night, what a treat. This is the first film in a long time where I got to thinking about what it would have been like to see this in one of the old movie palaces when it first came out and how mind-blowing it must have been. It's come a long way from that old Blackhawk Super-8 I checked out from the library, lo, those many moons ago.

Didn't even think about frame rates while watching, so small favors...

There seems to be a fixation with the idea of judder. On another movie forum I saw a huge long thread about how judder was a serious flaw in a movie. The thread went on and on for a week discussing it. People argued over whether it was frame rate or negative shrinkage. There was even discussion of "natural 24fps judder", claiming that all 24fps movies have judder because 30fps is the minimum frame rate to be able to depict smooth action. It was finally determined that the source of the "judder" was the fact that the shot had some footstep bumps in a handheld camera shot.

Oy. (See: "First World Problems.")

Just so I understand correctly, this concept of hammering everything into 24fps is limited to which formats and what display configurations? DVD? Blu-ray? All TVs? I just want to understand all the pieces in the chain.

Obviously good old film can run at any rate. But so too should digital. While a form of standards has their benefits, I hope that the next mass format isn't so keenly limited.

All modern video formats and systems can play 60fps. The same is true with theatrical projectors, officially or not. DCP even has an Archival Frame Rates standard, but it's not mandatory. I've read of theatrical projectors being tricked into playing arbitrary frame rates, but I can't find the article ATM. In short, we have the technical ability to accurately run silent frame rates on video, but the people in charge are stuck in a 24fps mindset.

What this means to you is that you need to know two things: the frame rate of the video and the frame rate of the transfer. With BD, it's easy. If it's speed-corrected and 1080p, then it's wrong.

Blu-ray can do 60fps progressively, which would work nicely for 20fps silent films - just triple each frame and voilà! But the 60fps Blu-ray standard is restricted at 720p resolution - and all the extra fames may reduce the efficiency of the compression. This may work best for lower-quality sources that do not have 1080p levels of detail, but still more than 480p. Or you can go the interlacing route - 59.94 interlaced frames per second in 1080i - within that you can run a film at 19.98 frames per second - with each frame being tripled once again and sometimes interlaced with the next. Most modern HDTV sets will detect that signal and present it correctly so you barely notice any interlacing, if at all. However, interlacing does not encode as well as progressive frames and will reduce the quality somewhat.

I'm still iffy on the conversion of lower frame rates to 24ps. Supposedly Masters of Cinema have figured a good algorithm for it - but I haven't examined it for myself. I wonder how people would react to a release that interpolated new frames here and there to turn a 20fps film to 24fps - which would smooth out the motion judder. If done with care and precision, it would be unnoticeable to probably 99% of viewers.

There are two ways to get 20fps to 24fps in a progressive fashion. Either you run the film 20% faster than it was intended or you insert an extra frame after every fifth frame. As Scott J indicated, Blu-ray does not support 1080/60p, so you are stuck with 1080/60i or 1080/24p.

For films that have been converted from 20fps to 24fps in a progressive fashion, this should be fixable with video editing tools once you rip the film from the disc. You fashion a script to first, delete duplicate frames then second, repeat every frame twice. This should retain synchronization with your score. Unfortunately it only works well for frame rates in multiples of 5. You have to be cautious about transfers like the Kino Nosferatu Blu-ray which deleted over 10% of the film frames in its conversion.

$15.58 on Amazon. That's nice. I just paid $35 two months ago and haven't even opened it yet.

Doesn't Blu-ray also support 1080p/30fps? Wouldn't taking 20fps and adding an extra frame for every original two frames be easier? I know it sometimes creates that "video" look.

$15.58 on Amazon. That's nice. I just paid $35 two months ago and haven't even opened it yet.

It is now in the $14's. I have a copy but at that price ordered a spare because I want The Lost World to be my next public screening and I always like to have a backup copy in case a disk does not play.

Matthew

Doesn't Blu-ray also support 1080p/30fps? Wouldn't taking 20fps and adding an extra frame for every original two frames be easier? I know it sometimes creates that "video" look.

For some reason blu-ray collectors insist on 24p. They refuse to buy 30p or 24i. It's based on ignorance, but I've seen people refuse to buy an interlaced blu-ray. You're right though. Some frame rates are easier to fudge than others. It all comes down to numbers and how they divide.

Doesn't Blu-ray also support 1080p/30fps? Wouldn't taking 20fps and adding an extra frame for every original two frames be easier? I know it sometimes creates that "video" look.

The Todd-AO version of Oklahoma is technically in 1080i/60 I believe. Oklahoma was one of the few Todd-AO releases to be shot at 30fps. But I could not observe interlacing artifacts, not for a lack of trying. I believe they do this by splitting each frame into two interlaced fields. LCD TVs can only show full frames, not interlaced frames. With true interlaced video, the fields were not captured at the same point in time, leading to "mouse teeth" artifacts in portions of the frame that display motion. With Oklahoma, the "fields" were captured at the same point in time, so you should not see the mouse teeth artifacts.

Films shot in Europe at the 25fps standard are sometimes presented in 1080i/50 and handled in a manner identical to the example given above. Due to the "interlace prejudice" and the desire to have one version for the world market, they are often converted to 24p and pitch corrected. Pitch correction restores the half-semitone lost when the film speed is sped up 4% but can result in sync issues if done poorly.

This blog entry shows how you can fit 20fps into a 60i format : http://nerdlypleasures.blogspot.com/201 ... opera.html Search for "dirty frame".