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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."
I'd personally like to see how you can do this as a home user. There's got to be a software program that does this sort of thing (ok maybe not the the extent that hollywood giants can do) or at least approaches it.
I've got tons of home movies I'd like to put on DvD and man I'd love to restore them. Unfortunately I think I'm stuck with them as as.
-- (Score:i , Imaginary)
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. 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.
Would this work?
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Have they found some way to automate this, or can they not yet trust the algorithms enough yet that they still have to manually go over each frame and correct the dirt spots based on previous and future frames?
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My grandfather (yes, that's right, my 67 year old grandfather) just recently restored some 8mm home movies from the 50's with his computer setup at his house. I dont know the specifics of what he used to do it, but obviously if he can do it, it must be possible ;)
What about the Black and white Charlie Chaplin and Laurel& Hardy movies... if they digitize those, all the animated characters will get a run for their money.. hey u cud digitally create more black and white Chaplin films!!!
Is this the same process that Criterion uses?
All of their restored movies look top notch.
I wonder how I can get one of these for my old home videos! I have all of the original VHS negatives, too! Oh, wait...
Seriously, though, it's nice to see studios taking such care of their movies. This is a far cry from a lot of what we've been getting for a the past few years. A lot of DVDs were nothing more than the DVD version of their laserdisc counterparts, and some low-budget DVDs were nothing more than transfers from VHS!
As a movie buff, it's great to see Warner going back to the original negatives do this. The only thing that's a concern for me is how they are going to select which movies will get this. Are they going to do this for posterity and history with all of their movies? Or are they only going to do this only with movies that can be turned around and sold on DVD? Obviously, if they're going be able to make a profit from this, they should. I'm sure that it's a huge effort. But are the more obscure movies that might not be as marketable going to get the same treatment in the future? Or are they going to be relegated to the warehouse never to be seen because "it's not worth it".
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
This is fine an well, but the painta of old films are almost part of their character. It's like the sound of a vinyl record, it's part of the experience of seeing a classic film.
"Give me taste, give me funk, give me fury, gimme some more."
i'm not sure if current technology would allow, but shouldn't they be scanning at 8000p, double the available information?
the reason that ~44,000Hz was chosen for sound recording was because humans could hear up to ~22,000Hz. Doubling the sample rate ensures that no hearable noise is filtered out. (IIRC, from the DSP work I did in school.)
shouldn't they apply the same idealogy to these scans as well so they don't have to do it again in 5 years?
A decade or two ago, the original glass plate photographs from some of the original sky surveys -- sorry I can't remember more precisely! -- were carefully scanned in some way that allowed mapping each grain of silver, treating the emulsion as a three-dimensional material.
That allowed sorting out the random noise from the very dim stars -- because where a very long (many hours) exposure had accumulated many photons from a single point source star, there was a column of silver crystals through the depth of the emulsion.
With simple photographic printing, that wasn't distinguishable from a single larger silver grain from random events. But once they had the emulsion remapped in three dimensions, they were able to begin retrieving far fainter images from the photographs.
This, while done with much older telescopes and film, was also done with much less background light and dirt in the air -- and of course gave the ability to compare then to now for fainter imagery.
I recall the article also mentioned that the astronomers involved were losing time from their sleep because they were also digging ditches to bury power lines between buildings, having no budget at all for astronomy. Might have been New Scientist or Sci. American, or a newsgroup.
Hmmm --- wonder if anyone has tried using, say, NMR imaging this way?
Seriously, not a bad idea at all. Set up a mic and capture the commentary. Also capture the original audio track directly, either simultaneously, or do another pass for that. Then author the DVD with two tracks -- original or w/commentary. That'd be sure to impress everyone in the family.
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
Yes. It was simply a function of work to do / operator time.
Bruce Perens.
When CDs started to get popular, the "audiophile" stores were making a big effort to sell high-end turntables for "discriminating" listeners. They had a turntable and a CD player with the same tunes playing, and would switch back and forth to show the difference in the sound, talking about how much "warmer" the LP sounded than the CD.
Sooooo... I set up a little test. First, I rolled the high frequencies off of the CD player, then added a bit more low end. When switching between the LP and the CD, most folks couldn't tell the difference, even the supposed "golden ear" audiophiles selling the equipment.
You *can* have an LP sound better than a CD, but most of the time, you don't.
8mm film is very poor quality. At best, you might get a VCD-quality playback, plus the frame rate is only 16fps.
That said, if you got a good scan of each frame, and wanted to take the time to do it, you could probably clean up the frames individually, and then use motion vector tracing to upconvert the framerate to 24/25/30/50/60/whatever. Alas, I don't know of any software for this purpose.
www.wavefront-av.com
The Doctor Who Restoration Team has been actively involved in the recovery and restoration of Doctor Who, Quartermass, and other BBC programmes. Some of their earlier work was been in creating a good colour print by combining black and white film with color NTSC betamax video. Recently they have been restoring the quality to B&W programmes. In addition to the video, they also have worked to restore the shows' sound track. More information is on their website: http://www.restoration-team.co.uk/.
The device to do this is called a telecine, and the technology is as old as television (how do you think they did it before video tape?) Newer ones that convert straight to digital are called datacines.
Until recently I worked for Technicolor (actually Thomson Broadcast & Media Solutions, which operates under the brand names Technicolor and Grass Valley) and actually helped service the machine that's being used to do this, the Spirit 4k datacine (minor suport role, it wasn't my primary product).
You could have your films scanned on one of these if you wanted to, though it would cost you a bit. IIRC the base model is about $1.2M, and there are maybe 100-250 of them in the world (I never had a need to look at sales data, that's just what I heard, and that number includes the older 2k line model.) They are mostly privately owned, though, and can be hired by anyone who wants to pay the price.
I wouldn't recommend it though. See, when the 2k model was first seeing action in the real world there were some complaints of occasional odd visual distortions. Analysis revealed that it was actually because at that resolution the scanner was starting to pick up the grain of the film. Obviously, that sort of thing can be delt with in post-processing, so it's not like it's totally pointless to go to those resolutions. I do think it would be a bit too much for 8mm, though.
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