Digital errors: Pat a Mat kutí

Back in February, I wrote how DVNR massacred individual frames in some episodes from 2003 and 2004. I had to update that post right now with examples from even more episodes. However, these digital defects are not something I would expect to see in the newest episodes as they are all recorded digitally, so it was an unpleasant surprise to notice a few in the recently released episodes. Rakso 98 caught this one from Létající stroj. Look at Mat's beanie, which goes through deletion phases in a couple of seconds. It is a minor mistake, noticeable only from a really detailed viewing.

Výroba ledu has a much more noticeable defect which I spotted on my second viewing. Look at Mat's hands in front of the tree. An even larger section is deleted here. It's not just these individual frames, but the whole scene.

There's another type of error that appears in a few episodes. I mentioned it when talking about Automyčka (which, interestingly enough, doesn't have that error in the movie version) and here it is in Potrubní pošta. Part of the frame is left unfilled, this time the left corner.

Does anybody want to wager a guess why these mistakes happened? What did the video postproducer try to fix on the images that caused the first type of mistake? Presumably, it's all just a consequence of some bad settings. Let me know if you find more of these.

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: