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."

Comments

Would love to see ...

[dcarey]

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.

Re:Would love to see ...

[WidescreenFreak]

Actually, the same method can be done for transferring 8mm with only one extra step.

I've done it by doing nothing more than shooting the 8mm image onto a bright-white screen, recording it with my camcorder, then transferring it to DVD. It certainly is not the same as a direct telecine transfer or the method that Warner is using, but for home use it works beautifully.

Digital mapping of film grain?

[lawpoop]

I'm no expert in film, but I'm wondering if there's a more robust way to digitize film. Depending on how large the color crystals are, I don't think it would be too hard to plot each crystal's location. You could either plot the center, or try to draw the geometric shape of the grain using shape ananlysis algorithms. It's that's too much data for now, just wait a few years for storage process to drop ;)

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?

I wonder what kind of noise removal they're using

[Noose For A Neck]

I'd be quite interested to hear about what kind of noise removal algorithms they use to remove all the dirt spots from the high-res film scans. From what I know of the film industry, most effects houses still use someone (or several someones) at a Linux workstation using Cinepaint (nee Film Gimp) to manually paint over suspension wires for films like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

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?

I know it's possible

[dknight]

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 ;)

Very nice - but will profits or posterity decide?

[WidescreenFreak]

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".

Re:The classic look...

[OG]

When you're listening to vinyl, you shouldn't know that you're listening to vinyl. The record and needle should be clean. There should be no pops or fuzz in the sound. What you should get is a great analog signal that has a better frequency range that CD, the tradeoff being a more dynamic limited range.

I'm more interested in seeing a clean movie that stands on its own than a movie that looks old and depends on accidental nostalgia (and for a time that most of us never even experience firsthand) for its emotional impact.

Re:The classic look...

[Jerf]

Bah. I'd much rather see the movie that I would have seen if I was alive in 1953 and popped on down to the movie theatre, not what's left of it after 52 years of degrading.

You want to de-saturate the colors, add dirt spots, and make the audio wobbly, run it through a filter on your own player. The rest of us would rather see an old movie as if it were made yesterday.

(Even stuff from the 80s is breaking down, I've even seen degradation in stuff from the early 90s, and the DVD is the best way to view it. My wife just bought Thelma and Louise on DVD yesterday (not a bad movie, really, even if there are no space fights :-) ), and it could well have been made yesterday; the colors were right, the detail was sharp, the audio's quality was sharp enough that my audio setup was the limiting factor. It's way better than what I've seen on TV... which surprises me nowadays, how many times the TV will play some crappy version of a movie with an outstanding DVD.)

Re:Possible but variable quality

[Phreakiture]

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.

Re:Possible but variable quality

[MrResistor]

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.