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)
And here I've been thinking all those movies were 3-d! Apparently it was just a red/blue misalignment.
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 ;)
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."
"When a film is turned into a DVD, the first step is to scan each frame digitally and to store the data on a hard drive. The more times a frame is scanned, the more coherent is the resulting picture. Many DVD studios now scan films at "high-definition"--or 1,080 lines. Warners is one of just a few that scan at 2,000 lines (or, in the parlance, "2K scanning"). Soon, beginning with a Wizard of Oz reissue later this year, it will start releasing Technicolor DVDs scanned at 4,000 lines ("4K scanning"). This is a significant number. Engineers estimate that if you digitally reproduced all the information on a frame of 35mm film, you'd need about 4,000 lines of data. In other words, at least theoretically (and for more on this caveat, click here), 4K scanning captures everything that's on a film.
That's good news, I have TNT in high definition and the movies really look much better than DVDs. Considering most so called HDTVs can't even do 1280x720, the lowest HD spec, it's good to know that these films are being future proofed.
For what it's worth, if you want the best picture quality in an HDTV get a tube, they're big and heavy but they can actually do 1080i. Think nosehairs on CSI.
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When George Lucas red did the original trilogy onto DVD he used something similar to what you are asking for. It found (or was pointed out to it) the dirt spots and it went a few frames forwards and backwards to see what should be there and interpolated the pixels.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
Regarding my previous comment, Pinnacle has since renamed the AV/DV Deluxe to the MovieBox DV.
Don't get me wrong - there are others out there that are NOT from Pinnacle. But Pinnacle is one of the better companies IMHO - and they've bought out some of the more prevalent competition, like Dazzle.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
.. pa-ra-bo-la, pa-ra-bo-la, 2 pi R, 2 pi R, where's your latus rectum, where's your latus rectum, 2 pi R
Posted anon, as I work for this firm; Alchemist Ph.C has algorithms to track things like suspension wires without removing things like telegraph poles.
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.
With the careful that they've selected to do their restorations, I intend to remain optimistic. I hope the money they make by releasing their cash cows pays for a few obscure dictorial debuts, oscar winners, and industry milestones.
We need these works of art preserved forever. What better way to preserve them then by spreading high quality copies all over the world?
This is tricky, because you generally end up killing some of the image quality if the algorithm is to liberal.
You could automatically clean some stuff up, but if the scratch is major, its best to have someone go in and repaint it mainually but cloning parts of a previous or next frame or matching colors next to the scratch.
In America we are imprisoned by our fear of them.
That I dont have to see Bernidete Peters or Woody Allen, begging for money to preserve old films anymore?
The negative was preserved in a climate-controlled vault for 60 years. When it was finally opened, they found that fungus had grown on the negative.
The negative was chemically cleaned. Then, it was digitized in a wet-gate telecine. This is an impressive bit of optical technology: the film is immersed in a fluid with the same refractive index as the film itself. The fluid fills pits and scratches in the film, and they disappear.
The resulting digital movie went through an algorithmic "dust-buster" process, and then the reels with the worst damage were retouched by hand frame-by-frame. An operator got about 90 seconds to retouch a frame. There are 24 frames per second of film. This stretched the computer technology at the time, MIPS-based Sun or SGI workstations with clock speeds of a few hundred MHz, as it was difficult to simply read and write the film frame in sufficient time. It would be easier today on a fast PC.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
We can now own a definitive version of Reefer Madness!
No, you are not! You can transfer 8mm and 16mm at home. It's not the most technical method, but I've done it before for a friend of mine and it worked beautifully.
Just project the 8mm/16mm film images onto a bright-white screen that has a lot of reflectivity to it, physically place a camcorder directly above the project - or slightly above and slightly behind - to minimize the "trapezoid" effect, record the projection with the camcorder, then use one of the many analog-to-digital bridges out there to transfer it to your PC.
If there is any audio, you can capture the audio either through the camcorder or through the PC's sound card and then synchronize.
This is not going to give you anywhere near the quality of a telecine transfer, but it work beautifully, particularly if the editing software that you use can enhance brightness, contract, and color.
The Overrated mod is for reversing inappropriate, positive mods, not for voicing disagreement with a post.
explains reel to digital conversion on the Criterion edition of Monty Python's The Meaning of Life in a very funny and useless fashion.
"Me claiming Satan exist is just as valid as you claiming an atom exists" - 1inChrist
George Lucas used Shake made by Apple to remove the all the dirt spot and clean up the image. It was somewhat automated, but I there was quite a bit of hard manual work done too.
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....Heaven's Gate will still suck.
befuddled (noun) 1. Unable to create a pithy sig
Most big city headquarters libraries have the equipment for this.
You need to prepare everything beforehand. That is put everything on one big roll so once in go in your feed the film and hit go. They don't want you editing in there at a time. You only get an hour, plan to convert as much as you can in that time.
Big city and headquarters is key. Your local branch is unlikely to have it, and they might not even know who has it. Call the headquarters and ask though.
"Unfortunately, remastering music or films often take a part of their souls.
:)
No wander why many music fans (I'm thinking Jazz, Classic music) are still buying used vinyl discs.. The music seems to have more "spirit" that way. It feels roots
There's even a software that immitates the glitches from vinyls discs and plays MP3 that way, adding noise. (The good thing is that the MP3 won't slowly decay to finally become unreadable... oh yeah it will but it will take much longer and can easily be transfered to a newer support)."
Ah, the glory of so-called "audiophiles".
The reason why vinyl is useful is greater dynamic range, NOT scratches and other artifacts. Crackles and pops do not make a "soul".
"Engineers estimate that if you digitally reproduced all the information on a frame of 35mm film, you'd need about 4,000 lines of data. In other words, at least theoretically (and for more on this caveat, click here), 4K scanning captures everything that's on a film."
Bullshit. As a photographer I know thats a bunch of bull. What kind of engineer stated this? Engineer of peanut butter?
35mm even old larger grain stuff has far greater usable resolution that that. Factually, the resolution is infinite as it is an analog source, but there is a "limit" to where gain is negligible. 4000ppi isnt it. Try 8000.
There is also a question of dynamic range. Although older films lack in that department, there will always be degradation in analog to digital conversion. Always. Depending on the scanners used, 8000ppi can output less quality than a 4000ppi scan.
Too much is dependant on the scanner to give one bullshit number and say hey that = quality. Thats exactly the same myth attached to MHz and Mega Pixels.
The system they use identifies potential noise, dirt, scratches, spots, etc. in each frame but requires a person to verify each one. The reason for this is that many visual artifacts that look like noise are actually supposed to be there: a flickering candle, the shimmer of light off a water droplet, etc. might have elements that only last one frame and would be mistaken for noise.
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?
that industry's way ahead of hollywood on this one.
Turns out John Wane and other early movie stars looked better in the fuzzy colors. Something to do with their alien ability to bend light. Okay so that last statement was a bit much.
two years ago, the 1926 movie Metropolis was completely restored and transfered to DVD, the results were beautiful
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
"And no, Mister Youngman, I will not take your wife, as I already have one of my own."
Carthago delenda est!
but at least it cost a lot of money.
The results were passable but not great. The apparent resolution is below broadcast TV, not nearly as sharp as a DVD of a commercial film. Your grandfather might have used a similar method, projecting into the lense of a digitial video camera, or even projecting onto a screen and just recording the image from there. I couldn't say whether the fuzziness is due to the film or the transfer method since our old projector is in poor shape and might eat anything it played.
I've heard of mail-order processors who will digitize more directly from the film itself. Ideally they would scan each frame individually (and at staggeringly high resolution) like Warner Brothers is doing. But I doubt that any processor catering to home movies is nearly that advanced.
Also, home 8mm films are in color, so they wouldn't have the advantages of Technicolor movies that were recorded onto three black & white negatives. Plus, the average basement or attic is a far worse place for film than a climate-controlled professional storage facility. Still, it's probably wise to digitize your home movies now before they get any worse.
AlpineR
It's true that a Feature film is distributed on average of about 6 reels of 35mm film. The days of switching reels are over. Now the projectionist will wind all the reels in succession onto a large platter system and all the reels make one big flat reel on the platter. The movie is played, winding from the center out. Like a CD.
The projector then through a series of pulleys, play the movie and wind the movie onto a lower platter in the tower. When the movie is finished and lays on the lower platter. The projectionist pulls the beginning of the film from the middle of the reel (after winding it through a brain) and through the pulleys for a next showing.
In a 20plex theater, switching projector reels would take the man power that your local cinema can simply not afford.
The cigarette burn illustrated from Fight club interesting enough still shows up although is mostly useless. The one illustrated in fightclub on the screen was actually at the changing of the reel, so you saw the genuine cigarette burn in the real movie. It was later put into the DVD specially.
...::----::...
I am in no way affiliated with this sig.
What in the hell are you talking about?
Crackles and pops do not make a "soul".
Yes, everyone knows that Snap is the one with the soul.
Mmmm... rice crispy treats...
I'd be quite interested to hear about what kind of noise removal algorithms they use
I think it is called Macrovision Quality Protection.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
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.
1. Scan the film to individual images, preferably at 32 bits per color, Kodak's Cineon format will handle this or ILM's OpenEXR format (it's open source too).
2. Load frames onto harddisk
3. Edit each frame gamma, color corection, and dust-busting that's 24 frames per second, that's a lot of frames for a 30 minutes of film.
convert to a color-dept for encoding, then encoding/
4 do the menues
5 burn the DvD
in short a lot of work take a look at Cinepaint for the frame editing software.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Want another analogy? If you want to capture that perfect potato taste, dig up a potato and eat it raw. Me personally, I think I'll stick to slicing it up, deep frying the slices, and putting a little salt on...
People often focus too much on the digital aspects of media transfer, and don't give enough attention to the analog aspects. Wet-get is indeed a very good way to make old film look new. It's also great for keeping new films looking new. Brad Miller, the guy who runs film-tech.com, sells a wet-gate system for use in theaters that he calls "Film-Guard". It's pretty amazing stuff -- I wish more theaters would use it. It helps prevent dirt build-up and other problems, so that a carefully handled print using Film-Guard can still look brand new after being run for weeks or months. He often brags that he could run a print at his theater using for a year and have it leave looking better than when it came in.
Free Hans!
Not sure where you got the idea they were using Shake. Lowry Digital did the restoration, and while Macs were used, it was done with proprietory software.
There is a really good documentary about the restoration of "Gone with the Wind" on the new 4-disc DVD boxed set. In it, you can hear some of the Warner Home Video people talk about it. They seem to have the right attitude -- don't try to "improve" things, just make them look as faithful to the original as possible. I've heard other restoration "experts" talk about making old films "better", and just cringed. The Warner folks didn't do that. I was really impressed.
Free Hans!
I wrote a perl script to do this basicaly it read in the file name and fed it to imageMagik, print a previous frame at 25%, the current image at 50%, the next image at 25%, compost the 3 then move on to the next frame. It didn't work to badly as an experiment proof-of-concept kind of a thing.
My intention was to use this as a base for an automated edit program where i could scan the frames manualy, pick a frame that needed correction, do the correction manualy and record the results. This would build into an edit script that ran automaticaly. Unfortunatly, on my old dinosuar of a computer it took 3 seconds to process each frame and I lost interest.
Cinepaint is pretty cool, I've found the flip-book feature really handy, I think they are still in a massive re-write though, they are dropping GTK in favor of FLTK. This should be a good thing if it results in the processing code being seperated form the UI code, which will make it easier to automate the code with scripts; and a bad thing if the work-load kills the project.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Because it uses three strips of film, you actually have more film area with which to record color information. This gives you better dynamic range, which gives you more vivid colors.
It's similar to the way a 3-chip professional TV camera gets better color than a one-chip consumer camera.
Couldn't the guys at Apple made a plugin to make Jar-Jar disappear with it?
There's no info on what if anything they did to the
sound track. Maybe there's a way to get rid of that boxy "old movie" sound.
Right now 4000 lines is about 4000 dpi - about double the grain size I'd guess on average. That's about the same sample rate vs analog master media as audio CDs.
Let the same "digital vs vinyl" arguments begin for movies! But I'll tell you it's a lot harder to make a decent print of a movie than it is to press a decent vinyl LP. Even for crappy mass releases, it's $2000 to $3000 per print, and they wear out fast. Your Telarc Hi-Fi 35mm print of Lawrence of Arabia is going to set you back $5 or 6K. Within a few years most Hollywood movies will be shot on digital anyway.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Lucas used Lowry Digital Images. Apple has an article on it. http://www.apple.com/pro/film/lowry/starwars/
d tsacquire slowry.html
Doing a quick google for Lowry's website turned up results for articles dealing with DTS' aquisition of Lowry Digital Images.
http://www.digitalcinemareport.com/news/
The article only mentions Warner Bros. I wonder if this process is also being applied to all the classic films Ted Turner bought the rights to and colorized? Hopefully they will remaster the original black and white versions. I know you can turn down the color controls to watch a colorized film in black and white, but then you're looking at the monochrome version of the colors that were added. To me it makes it look as if there's a gray filter over the whole thing. In the past Turner has had a very big-man-behind-the-desk attitude about colorized movies, responding to critics by saying things like, "Last time I looked I owned it." So I'm not holding my breath waiting for great remastered DVDs of Turner-controlled films.
One of the articles referred to "loss of emotional expression" due to the loss in quality caused by multiple copying.
This reminded me of something I'd been thinking of; footage of (eg) WWII and that era tends to be old and crackly. Does the 'old' appearance of the film tend to have a distancing effect on the audience?
Or put another way, would digitally cleaning up this footage make it seem more relevant to today's audiences without artificially adding to the content?
Of course, cleaning up is not the only way this footage could be improved. If it was possible to electronically compensate for (e.g.) bad focus and camera shake, this too would improve things. Perhaps overexposure and 'blooming' (don't know the technical terms, but you know when an area of a photo is so overexposed that it 'glows') could be compensated for; although to regain bleached-out detail from overexposed areas, it might be necessary to go back to the original film- unless the digitisation includes a *very* wide dynamic range.
Obviously, the footage would still be in black and white; it might be more relevant to today's audiences if it were in colour. Colourising it artificially would (even if it looked good) definitely be "adding to" (i.e. modifying the actual content of) the original footage in a way I'd consider unacceptable.
So, the big question is; is it theoretically possible to recover some, or all of the *genuine* colour information from black and white footage?
Before someone posts a knee-jerk reaction saying "the information is lost and can't *ever* be regained".... consider this:-
Imagine that certain colours of light could penetrate into the film itself deeper than other colours could (I'm not saying it can, I'm making that up).
Thus, if that were true, we could regain some- or all- colour information by (somehow) reading the different layers of the film, which would be differently exposed (viewed from the front we would have the "averaged" sum of the layered exposures). This could be the basis of a "true" colour restoration.
Of course, all that is conjecture, and very possibly untrue. BUT; I said it to illustrate that there may be a number of ways that supposedly "lost" colour information may be stored. Even if possible, it's likely to be *horrendously* difficult... but we're talking about theoretical possibility here.
So; I'll ask again:- Is it theoretically possible to get colour from mono film?
(Yes, I know some old-WWII colour film in which the colour information had faded to B&W has been restored; but I'm talking about film that was monochrome in the first place).
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And I don't mean 2x, 4x... Early silent films were shot at a wide variety of frame rates, as many were hand-cranked or there was a need to be thrifty with film. With a DVD, you're stuck with what whoever converted it thought, which isn't guaranteed to be correct. I recently bought a DVD of the Fritz Lang film, "Woman in the Moon" (Kino Video) which was a nice image transfer, but the playback seems quite fast to me. Problem is, playback speed of the old silents is somewhat subjective, and silents tend to get short-shrift in the market because it's too special-interest.
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/.
Perhaps now WB can also find a Bicycle Thieves print that hasn't been dragged through the Roman streets and restore it.
Okay, this isn't entirely on topic, because the article is talking about technicolor prints...though it fits the broader topic of film to DVD transfers. So dammit, I'm gonna rant anyway!
I recently purchased a nice DLP projector (A BenQ PB8220), my first foray into things larger than my old 27" Samsung, it's a beautiful thing...but unfortunately, not all the DVDs in my collection live up to such a standard.
For instance, one of my all-time favorite movies, Grosse Pointe Blank, isn't anamorphic! Now, 10-feet-wide on your livingroom wall, even a decent transfer will show its flaws...but when you're already wasting a bunch of lines of video resolution on black bars...well, you get the idea. (It's also annoying having to change my ratio settings on the DVD player and the projector every time, to keep it from being centered in the middle of the 16:9 band as a 4:3 image)
And are the studios ever going to do a proper transfer of movies like that to anamorphic DVDs? Probably not. (What's even worse, is that it seems to actually be cropped down from full-screen!)
What recourse do fans of movies that just happen to not be the latest blockbuster, or popular enough for remastering every 5-or-so years, have?
Okay, have at me with the modding down, I finally got that rant out of my system.
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
Perhaps now they can go back and re-do some of their old movies that they only released in pan-and-scan format...
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Film shot at 24 frames per second (fps) used to be transfered to video, (for NTSC, nominally 30fps or 29.97fps for color) with a telecine (projector and matching video camera). The time-stretch problem was "solved" by using a so-called 3/2 pulldown on the film projector, which was gen-locked (kept in sync) with the video. Using an eccentric cam, the film was advanced (pulled down) in an irregular manner: Every other frame lasted 1 video frame [that is, two interlaced fields] whereas those in-between were held in the film projector for 3 video fields. On the resulting video transfer of the film, every time a film cut happened to fall over in the middle of a video frame, the result looked like a 1-frame dissolve; hardly noticable to most people, but a somewhat "softer" transition than the original film edit. The same sort of printing technique was sometimes used when preparing silent films (nominally 16 fps, or 1 foot per second) for projection on 24fps projectors. The result looks awful, but was deemed to be better (by someone) than the "sped up" ("undercranked") effect of showing film shot at 16fps on a 24fps projector. It sounds as if your "Girl in the Moon" DVD may have been made from such a film print. Many commericals are still shot on film, but at 30fps, to make them look better in a video transfer done 1:1, with no interpolation.
I'm sure, like with anything else, time and money are the limiting factors here. But if they concentrate on the movies with mass appeal first, the proceeds from those DVD sales can fund further restorations, and in the meantime the technology will improve/get cheaper, making future conversions easier.
there was a short segment that referred to having the original camera lens that took a picture, using lasers to map the imperfections in the lens, and then making a higher resolution picture than the film was capable of, by extrapolating the imperfections out of the negative..
I wonder, if you could digitize at a higher resolution that the grain, and use such a hypothetical match on the original lenses, to even improve on that scan method....
(what ever happend to those damn round disc film cartridges anyway-- ya know, the ones that came out between 35mm and APS?)
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
I'm a developer on the mjpegtools project. It's an open-source video-processing/encoding package.
The CVS version of our package contains a tool called y4mdenoise. It does an incredible job of analyzing a video frame-by-frame and restoring details buried under noise.
You can read the implementation document here if you'd like. Basically, it takes advantage of the fact that video tends to consist of repeated pictures of the same things. It figures out which parts of the picture are repeated frame by frame, compensating for motion, and resolving details down to the pixel level. It then averages together all the instances, and comes up with very smooth values for all the separate images. This is ideal for removing random noise (prevalent in 8mm recordings and VHS tapes), and tends to sharpen the picture too.
We haven't released this code yet, but CVS is pretty stable. I figured the Slashdot crowd would be more interested in hearing about this now, instead of whenever we stop coding long enough to officially release something.
Oh, and our tool for converting frame-rates, and doing 3-2 pulldown, is called yuvkineco. It doesn't support the 16 fps of 8 mm film yet, but we can always add it!
"Once we've identified and embraced our sickness, we'll have strength...and that's when we get dangerous." - John Waters
...going back to the original technicolor negatives, preserved in temperature-controlled rooms...
It still amazes me that somehow having something in a temperature-controlled room is even worth mentioning. For crying out loud, my crummy apartment is a temperature-controlled room. --Matt
Matthew Brundage
Silver Spring, MD
One thing that annoys me about contemporary film transfers is that the film owners don't always seem to have the rights or the necessary incentives to reproduce the original production.
The "restored" film may contain different music or have various trademarked goods wiped out.
I've never watched "Roswell" but I've read that the DVD version of the show has different music than the broadcast version. That's pretty bad.
I own a DVD copy of "Breakfast at Tiffany's" and a copy of "Seventeen" magazine in Holly's apartment has been retouched to be a nondescript "Fashion" magazine.
And of course there's the whole thing about manufacturing a "wide screen" version to sell to pretentious suckers when the original production was in small screen format. Usually they just strip off the bottom and top of the image, much like TV producers would discard the edges of wide-screen movies.