Rodzinski - first question: What are sketchy opticals. Opticals in movies are dissolves, fade-outs, fade-ins, anything with effects. Whoever was doing Warners' dupes (dupe negatives) to make the optical dissolves, etc. was the WORST. Now, there were two ways of dealing with opticals - you let them run from the cut prior to them beginning all the way to the cut going into the scene when they're done. In most cases, dissolves are short and so the latter is fine. In the case of a film like Giant, where they do the latter, sometimes those opticals in and out of the production footage can go on for many, many minutes and so those entire sections look ugly and soft and extra grainy because the footage is being duped The first way is to do what they call cutting in short, which means the second the optical begins there's a bump in the footage as it goes to the optical and a bump going out of the optical and those little bumps are cutting in and out of the opticals as soon as you can. In other words, the first way the optical lasts just the length of the actual dissolve or fade or whatever In the second way, the optical lasts for the entirety of the scene prior to the optical beginning (hence no bump as it cuts in and out) and the same on the other end. I prefer the first method.
In Rio Bravo, they do both, and the ones that aren't cut in short really look bad.
