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."
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?
Software piracy is victimless theft.
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 ;)
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.
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.
:-) ), 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.)
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