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

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 ;)

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.