DVNR disfigurement

"Where the hell is half of my hand?!"

The 2002-04 Pat & Mat episodes are a bit of a technological hybrid. They were the last episodes to be shot with analog cameras on 35mm film. Those films were then transferred digitally and (not counting the pilot, Puzzle) opening and closing titles were added on to the digital copies. The results were not satisfying. The first batch of episodes (especially those from the Patmat studio) have somewhat washed out colors and the transfers are full of dirt, which made the episodes look older than they were and they were, in fact, brand new. The results improved from episode #63 onward, but the digital processing team at Ateliéry Bonton Zlín, the producer of the series, obviously still had  reservations. They tried to fix the situation with a pretty bad solution: DVNR.

As Anime News Network writes, DVNR or Digial Video Noise Reduction is a digital filter that's applied to video to remove video noise, film dirt, and other undesirable artifacts from the image. DVNR mostly combines two methods: comparing each pixel to its neighbors to figure out if that pixel is a tiny speck that's standing out too much and comparing the same pixel location in neighboring frames to see if it disappears. DVNR can have beneficial effects on live-action films, but using it for animation is not recommended. In animation, many things move faster than they would in real life, leading the program to think that they are in fact dirt. The program then tries to remove those items as it believes they are obstructions to a clearer picture.

DVNR was applied to four episodes, #72-75. Those four episodes are: Fax, Jahody, Hrají golf and Někam to zapadlo. I first noticed something was wrong with the video while watching Jahody. There seemed to be something wobbly with the animation and I couldn't figure out why. A slower playback discovered that the episodes suffered from bad DVNR. Whenever there was rapid movement, the computer thought it was actually excessive dirt and tried to correct it, ruining many frames in the process. The most affected were Pat & Mat's hands, with parts of them obliterated when they moved in quick succession. See the results for yourselves:

Fax

Mat's kulich missing its top

 DVNR does not just take away, but also adds where it shouldn't.

Here Mat receives an extra limb:

  

Jahody

 

  Hrají golf 

the golf ball magically disappears into thin air

Mat still not fully recovered from his runny nose in the Flu episode

It's golf without hands!

Někam to zapadlo

Mat trying out a new look: transparent make-up

Někam zmizela ruka

These are just some of the examples, with many more to be found in the episodes. Update May 18: Mateush recently found evidence of DVNR in yet another episode, Zavařují. Thanks, Mateush. Here are a few frames. There is less damage, but it's still there.

That made me believe DVNR was also utilised for the subsequent episode, Rogalo. I'm not that sure, but I believe I found an appearance of it in this episode as well. My uncertainty comes from the fact that Pat has dirty fingers throughout the episode.

The irony of it all? The DVNR used didn't do a good job of cleaning up the picture as well. It failed to recognize dirt where it should have, like on the lower right corner of this frame:

I didn't notice DVNR on any of the other episodes, so please let me know if you did. Hopefully, these errors will be rectified in the future with new, better transfers, something that all pre-2009 episodes badly need.