L’Inferno New 4K restoration and Blu-ray Indigogo Campaign (Redwood Creek Films)

[thuata]

Originally Posted by Vanguard

They emailed out a Vimeo link to backers. 1080P only

So is the file on disc, here is the technical information I could retrieve :

General
ID : 0 (0x0)
Complete name : /mnt/tmp/BDMV/STREAM/00001.m2ts
Format : BDAV
Format/Info : Blu-ray Video
File size : 11.4 GiB
Duration : 1 h 5 min
Overall bit rate mode : Variable
Overall bit rate : 24.8 Mb/s
Maximum Overall bit rate : 48.0 Mb/s

Video
ID : 4113 (0x1011)
Menu ID : 1 (0x1)
Format : AVC
Format/Info : Advanced Video Codec
Format profile : High@L4.1
Format settings : CABAC / 4 Ref Frames
Format settings, CABAC : Yes
Format settings, Reference frames : 4 frames
Codec ID : 27
Duration : 1 h 5 min
Bit rate mode : Variable
Bit rate : 22.3 Mb/s
Maximum bit rate : 25.0 Mb/s
Width : 1 920 pixels
Height : 1 080 pixels
Display aspect ratio : 16:9
Frame rate : 25.000 FPS
Standard : PAL
Color space : YUV
Chroma subsampling : 4:2:0
Bit depth : 8 bits
Scan type : Interlaced
Scan type, store method : Separated fields
Scan order : Top Field First
Bits/(Pixel*Frame) : 0.430
Stream size : 10.2 GiB (90%)
Color range : Limited
Color primaries : BT.709
Transfer characteristics : BT.709
Matrix coefficients : BT.709

Audio
ID : 4352 (0x1100)
Menu ID : 1 (0x1)
Format : PCM
Format settings : Big / Signed
Muxing mode : Blu-ray
Codec ID : 128
Duration : 1 h 5 min
Bit rate mode : Constant
Bit rate : 1 536 kb/s
Channel(s) : 2 channels
Channel layout : L R
Sampling rate : 48.0 kHz
Bit depth : 16 bits
Stream size : 721 MiB (6%)

[kishiro]

25 fps interlaced at 1080i (50hz)..
I wonder why they did that...? They are potentially making it useless for US customers where (some) players/TVs still have bad support for 50hz material (though it's become better in recent years where TV models have identical features worldwide) Sure if you're going for 12.5 fps it would make sense with everyother frame a duplicate. But the massive amount of interlacing artifacts seem to suggest they are going for something else. Also that would be a pretty low framerate. Most Silent films had (variable) frame rates from between 14 – 26. In the early nineteen-tens it was usually lower framerates 14-18, when in later nineteen-twenties it was usually higer; 18-24 fps. (Playback speed was another story with films being played back at at different usually higher speeds then what they were shot at. and it could wildly differ from cinema to cinema).

Other public domain versions of L'Inferno varies from 50 to 75 minutes, with different chosen framerates and frame-interpolations.
I can speculate what framerate this new restoration has *if* the underlying print is based on the same cut of the film as for instance the Mike Kiker scored version from 2016. That version was encoded in a progressive 24 fps container with aprox 10 frame-duplicats per second, making the source ~14 fps with a run-time of 72 minutes. That makes for ~60844 unique frames and 35mm film-length to about ~1159 meters long.
If the film-print used for the new restorarion was of the same lenght and the final BD-Runtime is 65 minutes, that would make the underlying framerate in the Blu-Ray's 25fps/50i stream about ~15.5 fps. If they were going for a speed between 15 and 16 fps, the best way to go about it would be to choose 15 flat and encode it as 30p in a 1080i60 stream. Motion-clarity would be the absolute best since 30 is divisble by 15. you'd get no additional judder in panning shots and no interlacing artifacts at all.

Looking at the screenshots, the interlacing artifacts looks so pervasive and baked into the film that I don't think I coul'd recover the progressive frames with a de-interlacing and re-encode it. I would have to use a bob-filter, essentially removing half the vertical resolution from 1080 to 540 and then upscale it again to 1080p.

Note: this is just a (mathematical) speculation on my side, I don't know the underlying framerate for sure since I don't have the disc in my hands (yet).

In either case; this could have been so much better. Even if the scan was out of focus and damaged, they could at least to some digital stabilizations and a properly encode. It looks like they did a massive amount of sharpening to 'fix' the blurryness (you can see edge-enhancement halos even around damage and film-tears). and what happened to all the film-grain? maybe they did 'grain-managment' before the sharpening destroying the grain-structure. This makes me sad. It would probably look better if they had done nothing at all, just done a standard color-and-contrast-correction and put the raw-scan on disc.

[oddbox83]

I was sad I hadn't taken the plunge, but now I'm glad.

Looks like an awful print, with awful encoding.

That it's red aint gonna be helping - even though it's monochrome, they're using the lowest resolution channel in chroma subsampling for the tint - no room for sloppiness in the encode!

[TheCurator]

Received my copy today and fully agree with kishiro. It looks truly atrocious. This is the second in the recent releases from redwood creek I've backed (the other was The Magician) and I regret both completely. The Magician was actually worse, because they lied about issuing a pressed disc in the kickstarter then sent out BD-Rs.

The most unfortunate thing is it could have been so much better, and the creators of the project actually had the audacity to say it's a fine transfer when anyone with eyeballs can see it isn't.

[The Coconut God]

Finally received my copy and managed to watch it today. Before anything else, I must say it's a fascinating films, in spite of all the flaws of the release. Wish more of these Italian silents from the dawn of cinema got more attention. If D.W. Griffith is studied in film school, why aren't these more well known and widely available? Could it really all be down to the quality of the surviving prints?

Because it must be said that I don't think a better restoration would have made this look crisp. Part of the fuzziness and jerkiness is no doubt ingrained in the source. I checked a short 1913 film called Arctic Hunt from my recently purchased copy of Nanook of the North for comparison, and it has a similar lack of detail, as well as improperly exposed and out of focus shots that were used anyway. With such early films, you probably would have been happy with whatever you got. Here are some examples:









Now, you can see the blurriness and copious amounts of dirt and scratches, but you can also see the grain and there's no artificial sharpening, which is where Redwood Creek's work truly falls short. The arctic film is also from an old restoration, not a 4K one (Flicker Alley's Nanook was released in 2013).

The question is, are these people (or single person?) well meaning but misinformed? Passionate but not very skilled? Are they scrubbing the grain and sharpening the image because that's what they think "4K" should look like - in the same vein as video game cinematics are "upgraded" to 4K from digital sources that never had that resolution (I know that here there was supposedly an actual 4K scan, but it would have been grainy and blurry, and those might have been seen as "problems")? Their take on pressed vs burned Blu-rays is certainly odd - people aren't against burned discs because they're more often associated with bootlegs, they're against them because they tend not to last as long, and these are collectible items...

I wonder if better communication and a bit of learning could lead to better releases from them - which they should be open to if they're passionate about making these films available - or if they're just putting in a low amount of effort because they're swindling everyone. I mean, if it's the latter, making the video interlaced wouldn't have helped them very much, right? That seems more like a hands down inexperienced choice to me. Same with the fact that the contributors' credits were designed for widescreen and some of the names ended up cropped - yeah, this too.

In any case, at the moment I am as reluctant to finance their campaigns as I am intrigued by their choice of titles...

[thuata]

Disappointed as I was by the end result of this restoration, I was ready to regard the entire project as a scam since there are also a some dodgy things happening around it :
first, once the crowdfunding campain succeeds the blu-ray disc suddently changes to a burned disc, contrary to what was initially promised,
and Redwook Creek also claimed they would deliver a  2160p file on the disc after some people enquired about a possible 4K release, only to ship it with a 1080i file, an empty promise that feels like it's just trying to drive a few more sales.
But those could just be the result of inexperience and bad communication, so despite abstaining from further support any project they may start I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.

While some comments they've made about the restoration initially struck me as clearly dishonest (some sequences are truly amazing, we managed to recover some incredible details etc..) I think it simply could be treated as hyperbolic.

I've watched the movie twice, and I had a good time revisiting it, I also enjoyed the soundtrack, however I remain convinced that regardless of Redwood Creeks intentions it remains a very flawed release, and a highly problematic crowdfunding campaign

[bigshot]

Those screen caps don't lack detail because of video processing. That is due to the film element itself. You can see that this is dupe of something with scratches in it already. It's several generations away from the negative. The negatives probably got destroyed when our great grandfathers were young. And the blurring in motion isn't interlacing. It's the slow speed of the ancient film stock. They required a lot of light to shoot back then and the shutter wasn't as fast as more modern films.

I have seen several video releases of this film... Two on VHS and one on DVD. Every one of them was completely unwatchable. This is the oldest feature film in existence and it looks it. On previous releases, sharp clear scenes, even scenes where you could see what was going on, were sporadic. You'd get a minute or two that was clear enough to read, then it would go into stretches where the image was obliterated by damage, then back to clear enough again. You couldn't even read some of the inter titles. One VHS copy I saw just cut out all the bad stuff and it played like random scenes cut together for a half hour. And interlaced is the only way this film could possible be remotely smooth. If you tried to do this progressive it would judder like a jitterbug. There is absolutely no point in releasing this film in 4K. That would be like doing an SACD of Caruso records.

The question isn't whether this blu-ray looks good or not... this film is never going to look good. The question is whether it looks better than previous releases. If you can sit down and watch the film all the way through and basically know what is going on, this is the best release of this film that I've ever run across. But just to be clear about that, I haven't seen the Cineteca Bologna version. It disappeared too fast for me to grab it. The trailer on YouTube appears to be made up of the bits of the film that look decent. It probably had stretches of unwatchable stuff too.

I will say though that based on the caps, I'm not convinced about the red tint. I might turn off the color burst and watch it in B&W.

[bigshot]

I'm doing some post on this blu-ray myself. I ripped the disc (I am an archivist for a non-profit digital archive and can legally do that.) and brought it into Handbrake to convert to m4v. It came out as a gray mess. So I brought it into Premiere Pro and adjusted the exposure, highlights, shadows and black and white points. There is plenty of latitude there to make this a pretty good looking copy. The first time I converted to m4v in Handbrake, I tried to deinterlace, but Handbrake couldn't tell what the frame rate was supposed to be. It might vary throughout the film- I don't know. So I'm reconverting it as 25 progressive which will give me the interlacing as it appears on the blu-ray. I might experiment a bit to see if I can find a frame rate that works progressive since with m4v files I'm not limited to just the frame rates blu-ray can handle. I'll post some screen caps when I come up with something I'm happy with.

[Doomhunter]

Originally Posted by UnionJackMix

I dislike these types of claims "World’s oldest surviving feature-length film". Is it even true?
Anyway, is there a trailer or just those stills?

Two years later we have the epic Cabiria (1913) which is in pretty good shape, maybe someday for a blu.

I haven’t seen L’Inferno but it looks like a very interesting approach

[bigshot]

I'm still fussing with this. I've got a 25 fps version straight off the disc, and now I have a Yadif/bob version going. They used some sort of bizarre interlacing scheme, and I can't deinterlace it using normal settings. It interlaces everything, even gate jumps and the compression creates all kinds of weird artifacts on fast action. Their noise reduction is all over the map, but most of it is way too ham handed. The red tint makes the blu-ray unwatchable- dim, fuzzy and hard on the eyes. When I removed the tint and corrected the contrast levels, it becomes clear that they were working with a pretty good film element- not a lot of detail and a lot of damage, but at least everything has a readable contrast/brightness. There are only a few scenes that don't look very good at all, but most of it is pretty consistently watchable. If they had done a proper job of digital restoration and authoring on this disc, I think it could have looked pretty decent. A shame.

Screen caps corrected contrast and no red tint:

https://animationresources.org/stuff/inferno1.png
https://animationresources.org/stuff/inferno2.png
https://animationresources.org/stuff/inferno3.png
https://animationresources.org/stuff/inferno4.png
https://animationresources.org/stuff/inferno5.png
https://animationresources.org/stuff/inferno6.png
https://animationresources.org/stuff/inferno7.png
https://animationresources.org/stuff/inferno8.png
https://animationresources.org/stuff/inferno9.png

Once I got rid of the red and contrast corrected, it's watchable. And it actually looks a little better than the other versions I've seen (except for all the video artifacting affecting motion). I'm thinking I might be able to fix whatever I can in HD and then downsize to 480 to hide all the artifacts. I might be able to squeeze a good DVD out of this bad blu-ray.

EDIT: I was able to find a setting in Handbrake that eliminated the worst of the interlacing problems. It plays well in motion now. It didn't eliminate the interlacing entirely, and it is still 25 fps, but it plays good at speed. I bounced it down to 480i PAL and it looks very good. I'm exporting an HD copy as well, but the only information in the HD that isn't in the SD is noise. It isn't worth the price, but after a day's work on trying to fix it as best I can, I've come up with something that at least is better than any other release of this film that I know of.

[bigshot]

I made a clip of a short bit of what I ended up with... https://animationresources.org/stuff/infernoclip.mp4

This is compressed to stream and it's mono sound, but it will give you an idea of what is buried under all the red tint and sloppy digital processing on this disc.

Here is an outline of my process in case anyone wants to do this themselves...

1) Rip the disk to MKV. (I am the director of a non-profit digital archive and can do this legally.)

2) In Handbrake, export an HD m4v with the following settings: FILTERS: Detelecine Default, Interlace Detection Default, Interlace Yadif Bob, Colorspace Off, Color Grayscale checked. VIDEO: 25fps, Peak Framerate (VFR) Constant Quality 12 The rest of the settings are pretty standard.

3) Take that export from Handbrake into Premiere Pro and apply the following settings: Lumetri color > basic correction > light > Exposure 2.0, Contrast -50, Highlights, 75 Shadows -100, Whites 37.5, Blacks -25. Export.

4) Take that export back into Handbrake and export to normal 25fps PAL DVD quality.

I couldn't figure out what frame rate this was intended to be, but it would have looked much better if they had run it at 15fps encoded 30 or 12fps encoded 24. If they had done that, they wouldn't have even needed to interlace. At the time this was shot, cameras were hand cranked, so speed varied, and it varied again depending on how theater owners projected it. So there is no excuse for locking it into a frame rate that doesn't work well with blu-ray specs. There's still some combing, but no setting I found eliminated all of that.

Likewise, the red tint was a huge mistake. It muddies up the picture and makes it look fuzzy. Red is the most difficult color to work with in video, and it is different than yellow or green in that if you dial it back, it stops looking red and begins looking pink. There was enough latitude to force it to B&W and rebalance the contrast levels, but if they had done that before authoring the disc, it would have been cleaner and would have maintained more detail.

The other problem here is the noise reduction. Some scenes look like the film is being projected underwater and other look way over sharpened with every pebble on the ground being over defined. There is no consistent look. Knocking it down to 480i PAL evens all that out, and not much is lost, but this sure isn't the 4K look that they advertised. If they had left some grain and applied noise reduction with an eye to the scenes around the scene they are working on, instead of doing each one separately, there would have been more detail and more of a unified look. You don't have to remove all grain and noise- just pare it back to where there aren't jarring jumps in grain and noise.

The scanning looks great. The speckles and dirt are super sharp HD, so I'm sure the scan got everything there was to get out of the film element. But it looks like this project was rushed at the end and the digital cleanup and disc authoring weren't done properly. It's a shame because the film element they used was pretty good. Maybe the 4K transfer can be reapproached in the future. For now, at least I got a good DVD out of it.

[Scaramouche]

New topic on the Warning Shadows blu-ray following a recent review by DVDFREAK:
https://forum.blu-ray.com/showthread.php?t=365927

[CelestialAgent]

Hopefully the Terror Vision release will be somewhat of an improvement.

[Rayjg]

Redwood has interesting German Expressionism Kickstarter going that’s ending soon: Morn to Midnight. I wonder if TV will release that one too?