Slashdot Mirror
Old Film to DVD Transfers Examined
Richard W.M. Jones writes "Slate is
running an interesting article on the process involved in
Warner Brothers remastering films, the quality of the films being compared to the Criterion Collection discs.
Going back to the original
technicolor
negatives, preserved in temperature-controlled
rooms, the transfer begins with a 4,000
line scan, followed by digital alignment of
each color." From the article: "In some ways, these DVDs have finer color and detail than even the original film prints. In the old days, it was difficult to align those three strips perfectly. The task became still harder years later, when the films were reissued, because the negatives had stretched or shrunk over time. If you need all three strips to get the right color, and you can't line the strips up precisely, then the colors and the sharpness are going to be a bit off."
Would this work?
Sure, but really, it's going to an absolutely unnecessary extreme. You could plot the details of the grain like that, but the original prints were never expected to show anywhere near that much detail. At some point it just becomes gratuitous.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
wires do not qualify as noise. when the camera pans, the wires move across the frame. noise is independent of motion, it is NOISE. scratches and dirt on the film would qualify as noise, and are easy to remove using common denoising algorithms.
and to all you quality freaks... dvd quality is so pathetic compared to dual frame technicolor negative that even to speak of 'dvd quality' is to be foolish. the dvd is practically a decimation.
you could digitally create more Chaplin films , but we really really shouldnt. . ,I would buy them without pause (infact i better check on amazon to see this has not already been done)
.
Chaplins films were classics and should remain as such
If the studio redigitised them and shoved them on DVD
Also the marks brothers films were great
The comedy stylings of Groucho , Teito and karl(sorry couldnt resist that joke) are also amongst my all time faviourits.
Some of the modern Slapstick couldnt even compare to the classics
Although , ? by now , wouldnt most of the chaplin films be beyond copywright at this point , so couldnt anyone do it
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
It's still about visual resolution at the end of the day. You could show me atomic level recreations of films and I couldn't tell the difference from modern digital remasterings.
The art of this process is in learning what has to be preserved for perfect perception, not slavishly reproducing every physical detail of the original.
And remember, crystal level resolution is BAD. They are effectively a blotchy quantal reproduction of what is really a smooth analog transition from one colour to the next. But of course, people tend to confuse "original" with "good", and seem intent on dragging the baggage of previous, shitty technologies into the digital age. Same story with vacuum tubes and audio equipment.
Seems that those Monty Python folks are really quite interested in film preservation and restoration. There's another documentary on the "Meaning of Life" that explains all the nitty gritty. Is it worth it? I say yes. Going from unrestored faded film to a pristine new master is just as dramatic as the shift from black and white to color film.
If you want to get really fancy, you can look at the arrangement of the crystals, try to reverse-engineer the light as it struck the film, and virtually re-expose the image by plotting a new grain map on film.
I don't see why some of what you suggest wouldn't work (you're basically just talking super-high res scans, for the most part), but it's incredibly wasteful. Plotting the shape of each individual film grain, on a per-frame basis? First of all, it would take forever to do this. Second of all, visible film grain is usually something you want to eliminate during the restoration process, or at least cut back (eliminating it entirely can look a little unnatural, but reducing it can improve things quite a bit). So you're not really gaining anything by your suggestion.
I suppose this brings up another point, which is that "restoration" is kind of a misnomer in film. The idea isn't usually to restore the film to the way it used to look; the idea is usually to make it better than it ever looked. It's not always the case, but generally the restoration process includes color correction that can remove some of the character of the original film stock (for better or worse... some restorations have really been hack jobs that destroyed the look of the original), it includes grain reduction that reduces visible film grain, it includes scratch reduction that eliminates flaws that may have been present on the original negative, it often includes artificial sharpening (again, for better or worse), contrast enhancement, brightness mid-point adjustment, and a host of other image enhancements that anyone who's worked on still images will be familiar with.
This may be why Warner calls what they're doing "remastering" rather than "restoring" films. If you use the word "restore", you're bound to piss off some purists when they see the final result, whether it looks better than it ever did or not.
A bonus of this technique is that it would allow for near-perfect analogue re-creation of the original film by plotting grains for exposure on new film.
Well, see, this wouldn't work. You can't position film crystals wherever you want on a piece of celluloid; they are where they are. And as they are what carry the actual picture information, you can't just start with a blank gel and start adding crystals one by one. (I suppose someone could invent some kind of new printing process to do this using new materials that mimic film - maybe with a kind of precisely controlled ink whose droplet size and shape could be controlled - but what would be the point?)
Regardless, once you get to that point I don't much see the advantage over just projecting digitally from the high-resolution digital copy. A standard high-res scan will pick up the film grain as it is, so providing the resolution really is high enough, once you project it it will look indistinguishable from the original analog source. This is what we're moving towards. There's no point in starting analog, scanning into digital, then re-printing into analog.
btw, I just RTFA, and Slate makes a big deal about "Technicolor" prints being less prone to fading. This is wrong. There's nothing special about Technicolor prints - the company is still in business and prints about 80% of all commercial Hollywood films today, most of which will fade to red within 20 years. There's a big difference between "three strip" Technicolor and the one-strip process that Technicolor uses today, and it's not differentiated clearly in this article at all. The three strip process used three individual film strips sensitive to one light wavelength each - the current process uses three layers of crystals on one film strip. Both are Technicolor processes, though.