DVD details for
Aleksandr Nevskiy (1938) More at IMDbPro »

Michel Hafner (27 May 2001):
The three Eisenstein films have been available before from label Image. These DVDs were a sad joke with close to VHS quality. The Criterion DVDs are in another league and are the result of quite an ambitious project. New film masters were prepared and transferred on a Spirit Dataciné. That sounds very promising. Do we finally have these classics available with uncompromised quality, as good as the film sources and DVD technology allows? Unfortunately no. There is a serious problem that affects everybody that watches DVDs progressively.
The film masters used were newly made for Criterion. They are in good shape considering the age of the films. In addition a lot of speckles and other defects have been removed with digital processing. Film steadiness has been improved as well with digital image stabilisation. It is pretty good except for the opening credits of Ivan 1 which are dancing around and are window boxed as well.
Contrast rendition is mostly fine with deep blacks and good shadow detail. Nevsky is worst. The color sequence in Ivan 2 is disappointing, but it has been like that since the film was released. The masters do not provide better color.
Images are pretty sharp. Nevsky suffers from some fuzzy shots.
The noise and grain level is relatively high as expected. It has been somewhat reduced with digital noise reduction and restoration procedures.
Compression at a pretty high average bitrate around 5-7 Mbit/s is effective.
So where is the problem? It's once more in the area of video artifacts which seems to be a permanent challenge for all labels and studios since immaculate results are very elusive.
There are some overenhanced edges at times, but that's not the main issue. The main issue is that these 3 DVDs are simply incapable of delivering a clean progressive image to people with a progressive player or a scaler that does correct inverse 2:3 pulldown. They are riddled with motion artifacts of all kinds. There are the familiar jittery textures typical of digital noise reduction. There are tooth saw effects at the edges of moving objects as if you are watching interlaced video from a non film source with no reversable 2:3 pulldown. There are often scanlines visible. There are smearing effects as if two frames are averaged together. I have never seen anything like it from Criterion. It is very distracting on a good progressive display. It ruins the film look.
Closer inspection reveals that parts of the discs are encoded at 24p and parts at 60i and the encoding is randomly switching between the modes, making a clean progressive picture practically impossible. The inverse teleciné process before MPEG encoding has gone astray numerous times, it seems. There are seqeuences that are clean for some time, then the artifacting starts again. (Good examples are chapters 9 and 10 in Ivan 1 where clean progressive pictures are followed by pictures with strong interlace/aliasing artifacts in the middle of shots). Nevsky is less affected by this but not spared, especially in the final chapters. This kind of problem is rare for DVDs from high quality labels. It's a major mastering bug that should never have passed the quality control stage. It also makes you wonder if in this day and age with progressive players becoming more popular quality control still does not evaluate DVDs on a progressive display with correct inverse pulldown. Under these circumstances you can not miss this. Considering all the hard work and money that went into the creation of these masters such a lapsus is deplorable. These 3 DVDs need to be remastered to unlock the full potential of the transfers. The current versions are unacceptable and below Criterion's standards.
There is also something weird with the restoration examples on the Nevsky disc. The examples after restoration are not the same as the corresponding footage in the film. The film is dirtier than the examples suggest. Neither is the film identical with the before restoration examples. It looks as if the restoration on the film is simply another one than in the examples. Some shots in the film are so full of speckles, dirt etc. that they could well be not restored at all. Nevsky is certainly not in close to perfect condition as the introductory text to the examples claims. The examples are misleading. I wonder if on purpose or by accident. For the time being (June 2001) Criterion denies that anything is wrong.
Another 'thing' I do not understand is the recording volume of the soundtrack. The loudest sounds are nowhere near 0 db. You have to turn amplification way up to get a reasonable loudness. It puzzles me that digital resolution is wasted on purpose when there is no need to do so at all except following a dubious standard that makes no sense.
I have been looking forward to these DVDs for a long time. In their current state they are not what they could be. Unless they are remastered I can not recommend them to people with progressive displays that object to motion artifacts, as I do.
(Numerical valuations represent averages for all 3 discs.)