Reviews of silent film releases on home video.
Copyright © 1999-2024 by Carl Bennett
and the Silent Era Company.
All Rights Reserved. |
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Vanity Fair
(1911)
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This three-reel Vitagraph adaptation of the Thackeray novel stars Helen Gardner and Alec B. Francis.
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 Alpha Video
2018 DVD edition
A Tale of Two Cities (1911), black & white, ? minutes, not rated, with Vanity Fair (1911), black & white, ? minutes, not rated.
Alpha Home Entertainment, distributed by Oldies.com,
ALP 8101D, UPC 0-89218-81019-9.
One single-sided, single-layered, Region 0 NTSC DVD-R disc; 1.33:1 aspect ratio picture in full-frame 4:3 (720 x 480 pixels) interlaced scan image encoded in SDR MPEG-2 format at ? Mbps average video bit rate (capable of progressive scan upscaling to ? fps); Dolby Digital (AC3) 2.0 mono sound encoded at ? Kbps audio bit rate; English language intertitles, no subtitles; chapter stops; standard DVD keepcase; $7.98 (raised to $8.98).
Release date: 24 July 2018.
Country of origin: USA
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This DVD-R edition has likely been mastered from a 16mm or 8mm reduction print.
The film is accompanied by a soundtrack compiled from preexisting music recordings.
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This
Region 0 NTSC DVD-R edition is available directly from . . .
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 Harpodeon
2009 DVD edition
Vanity Fair (1911), black & white and color-toned black & white, 46 minutes, not rated.
Harpodeon, no catalog number, unknown UPC number.
One single-sided, single-layered, Region 0 NTSC DVD-R disc; 1.33:1 aspect ratio picture in full-frame 4:3 (720 x 480 pixels) interlaced scan image encoded in SDR MPEG-2 format at ? Mbps average video bit rate (capable of progressive scan upscaling to ? fps); Dolby Digital (AC3) 2.0 stereo sound encoded at ? Kbps audio bit rate; English language intertitles, no subtitles; chapter stops; standard DVD keepcase; $16.99.
Release date: 31 December 2009.
Country of origin: USA
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This DVD-R edition has been mastered from a 16mm reduction print. The slightly windowboxed video transfer has been scanned at high-resolution and digitally cleaned utilizing custom video software. The digital processing has stabilized the picture within the frame, which is in itself not bad, and some frame-specific digital work has been performed to remove the worst of print flaws such as scratches.
Some dust remains in the video master, as do some digital artifacts in the form of briefly-frozen areas of pixels at the fringes of people moving within the frame and slow-moving figures in the background. This jerkiness appears to be partially caused by the low-frame rate of the original film. While the background is stable, the moving figures in the picture sometimes briefly fluctuate at a slightly different exposure than the background.
This kind of digital ‘restoration’ has been a topic of hot debate between software developers and film purists. Purists want a representation of every frame completely in a home video product, which leaves the staunchest critic objecting to even the best DVDs that have ever been mastered, with their selective picture element compression. We are in favor of digital clean-up of video transfers, but only when such work is not visible in the final presentation. Here, the digital artifacts are perhaps more distracting than the flaws in the original video transfer may have been. Perhaps a faster frame rate in the progressive averaging of moving picture elements would have resulted in smoother movement within the frame. We prefer the look of other Harpodeon releases that don’t utilize digital clean-up techniques, print flaws and all.
The film is presented with two user-selectable, custom music scores.
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USA: Click the logomark to purchase this Region 0 NTSC DVD-R edition from Amazon.com. Your purchase supports Silent Era.
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This Region 0 NTSC DVD-R disc is also available directly from . . .
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