SFI & The Daily SME (frame 1408)

SFI & The Daily SME

Reviewed by dvdfreak

Last modified on Monday 17th August 2020, 08:39:55 PM

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Label:  SFI & The Daily SME (Slovakia)

Region:  1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 & 8
RCE protection:  No
Copyright protection system:  None

Disc type:  DVD5 (the data occupy 4.01 GB)

Playback time (hh:mm:ss.frames):  1:25:06.01

Video:  PAL
Aspect ratio:  1.33:1 non-anamorphic


Bitrate (min / avg / max):  0.16 / 5.51 / 7.10 Mbps

Bitrate (min / avg / max)

Audio:
 

Slovak Dolby Digital 2.0 mono* / 256 kbps
Slovak audio descriptive in Dolby Digital 2.0 mono* / 256 kbps

Subtitles: Slovak & English

Menus available in: Slovak & English


Special features:
 

  • Newsreel (8:03, in Czech & Slovak**)
  • About the movie (3 pages, in Slovak & English)
  • Press coverage (2 pages, in Slovak & English)
  • Biographies (2 pages each, in Slovak & English)
    • Martin Frič
    • Karol Krška
    • Paľo Bielik
    • Július Pántik
    • Jiřina Štěpničková
  • Photogallery (8 movie stills)

  • 16-page booklet (in Slovak)

Notes: This film is a part of the "Slovak Cinema of the 40's & 50's" DVD edition
(released by SFI & The Daily SME), which also includes:


The disc starts with the SFI logo, followed by an ad for Klapka.sk. The latter is actually a short interview with Maroš Kramár (1:00, in Slovak), who speaks about his role in Dušan Trančík's "Iná láska" ("Another Love").

From SFI's press release:

The "Slovak Cinema of the 40's & 50's" edition was supposed to be released last year [2010] already, however, given the physical condition of these older titles and the complexity of the restoration work, it was moved to this year. All the films in this edition are thus brought to the viewers in a high quality presentation with restored picture and sound. Because of the extensive print damage, the complete digital restoration took two whole years, the most difficult part being the image restoration. The colour grading on "Šťastie príde v nedeľu" was done by its own cinematographer Vladimír Ješina, who, as a close collaborator and friend of Paľo Bielik, corrected also "Kapitán Dabač" and "Štyridsaťštyri". The grading on "Čert nespí," also shot by Vladimír Ješina, was, due to Ješina's health problems, done by Peter Csordás. For the other films, whose cinematographers are not among us any more, the work was delegated by the Slovak Association of Cinematographers to Stanislav Szomolányi ("Katka," "Rodná zem," "Štvorylka," "Dáždnik svätého Petra") and Vladimír Holloš ("Varuj...!," "Vlčie diery").

Ladislav Dedík from Studio 727, who participated in the digitalisation and restoration of the films, describes the process: "The films we worked on were heavily damaged due to their age, quality of film stock, and the technological processes used in production and the creation of film prints. Because some of the films were used as propaganda material, the numbers of prints made were considerable, each new copy further damaging the original negative. In case of the war films, the authentic World War II archival footage used differed from the rest of the material in terms of grain structure and the amount of print damage. These parts made the restoration process much more difficult. The most frequently appearing types of damage were dust, dirt, splices, tramlines, scratches, tears and breaks, instability, gate hairs, jumps in grain density, and even missing frames. The most effort-demanding titles were "Varuj...!," "Vlčie diery," "Kapitán Dabač" and "Katka." To give you a better idea, while there were 1.5 million blemishes on average in each of the films in the previous edition [Slovak Cinema of the 60's], the majority of titles in this edition contained more than 20 million. This fact is the reason why some of these films took over a year to restore."


OK, so I complained about the banding in "The Quadrille" - well, it's nothing compared to what I saw here; an example:

SFI & The Daily SME (frame 26888)

It's a pity that all the effort that went into the restoration was at the last stage marred by poor encoding...

Oh, there's one more item I wanted to point out - judging by the opening titles, the picture appears to be slightly cropped:

SFI & The Daily SME (frame 3559)

Update: I've been informed by one of the people who participated in the restoration of these films that the cropping I'd mentioned above had already been "in place" on the photochemically restored archival print SFI had provided for the digital restoration - the film's OCN does not exist any more...

*difference between channels is -86.28 dB (0.00 %),
resp. -80.92 dB (0.01 %)
**subtitled in Slovak & English

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