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."
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 ;)
Your family shot your home movies in three strip Technicolor?
Are you Cecil B. DeMille III or something?
Seriously, the article is about old movies shot in Technicolor, which used a separate strip of film for each of the primary colors. Aligning those three strips is a pain. For regular 8mm home movies, you can use what's called a telecine. You can get inexpensive ones that attach to a video camera to do it yourself, or there are services that transfer 8mm to video.
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.
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.
That's way too much work. Just pay some neighborhood kids to re-enact those old films of your children going up and record it digitally this time.
In fact, I hear that's what George Lucas did with his old home movies. You can even add in some hilarious CGI sidekicks!
And if it's old family 8mm movies, have the old folks, Aunts and Uncles, Grandma and Grandpa, sit around and watch it as you show it and record it. Their audio commentary on the new sound track (which with most 8mm would otherwise be silent) is invaluable in sorting out who was who, what was what, and where they were doing something. It's a win-win. They get to see old footage they probably haven't seen in a while and you get a great commentary to go along with your new video version.
"As a photographer I know thats a bunch of bull."
As a photographer you are wrong. You've probably gotten mixed up between the frame sizes of 35mm still film and 35mm cine film. 35mm still film is about 1.6 times larger than cine film and has more detail. I'm a visual effects artist and I can tell you for sure that it's not worth scanning 35mm film above 4k. You just can't tell the difference You see more detailed grain but thats about it.
> My daughter, when she was 10, could look at a movie on television and tell me whether or not it was shot in Technicolor.
Yeah... It says so at the beginning of the movie...