DVD details for for
Roman Holiday (1953)

Michel Hafner (16 December 2002):
The classic Roman Holiday (1953) is now available on DVD mastered directly from a digital restored source at 2K resolution, digitally cleaned up by Lowry Digital Images in Burbank, California. How does it look?
The film master used was quite noisy and grainy, with dirt, speckles, scratches etc. as you can see in a supplement about the restoration. The original negative was not available. After digital cleanup the film master looks very good. It's steady and almost all film artifacts of the usual kind have been removed (but not 100%). At a certain price, and I don't mean $ (see below).
Contrast rendition is very good. No complaints. Images are sharp and the noise and grain level has been reduced so much that some shots are practically free of them while others still have noticeable grain. I would not say that the film looks so clean that it becomes unnatural or video like. It still looks quite film like in that regard.
Compression is good as well.
So what price was I referring to? Video artifacts, more precisely, digital noise and grain removal artifacts.
No doubt Lowry Digital Images are at the forefront of digital restoration methods, but perfect they are not (yet). The quite aggressive processing that was apparently necessary here has left a trail of more or less obvious artifacts behind. The problems occur when textures are in (fast) motion. They get distorted to some extent. Strange noise patterns become visible. Sometimes there is some flickering and occasionally some smearing, all very typical of digital noise reduction.
Even removal of fine objects can be found. Two examples for self study.
One minute and 55 seconds into chapter 13 focus on the electrical power lines of the tramway. They get partially erased and reappear from frame to frame.
At the beginning of chapter 9 focus on Peck's jacket. The noise reduction plays bad tricks on it. Watch how the textures of the jacket get smeared and move very unnaturally in the shot starting about 45 seconds into the chapter. This shot is actually so bad that I would call it a glitch that escaped quality control. It's as bad as not well done real time DNR and very atypical for the kind of quality Lowry achieves routinely in the rest of the film. Clearly the processing parameters are way off in this shot. If the 2K master has the same problems then this restoration is not quite the final one for the ages but an intermediate solution till better algorithms become available. Replacing film artifacts with digital filtering artifacts is not a sound principle for a definitive restoration.
Otherwise the pictures are clean concerning video artifacts. No distracting edge enhancement, no aliasing.
Putting the filtering issues aside I can say that this DVD looks marvellous considering the quality of the film masters used and is more often than not gorgeous to look at. Recommended. On the other hand it's sad that important films as this one were not better preserved and there is no camera negative to work from. If there were the DVD would look better still, with all the virtues of the current version but no filtering artifacts and even less noise and grain.