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Classic Cartoons Marred by Digital Restoration
Carl Bialik from the WSJ writes "When classic animated films undergo digital restoration, key features can get lost in translation. The Wall Street Journal reports that the process meant to smooth over scratches and dirt specks on old film "can also remove some of the lines that make up the animation -- for example, blurring Tom's face in a Tom and Jerry cartoon, or erasing lines in Woody Woodpecker's fast-moving beak." "
It does not look like the orignals had any scratches or dust (from the examples). Of course it is going to be harmful (don't fix what ain't broke). Anyone have any example of poor/dusty film that this might help with?
- Your stupidity got you into this mess, why can't it get you out? -Will Rogers
Why are they complaining about the tools when it's apparent that it's the workmanship that's at fault?
For an excellent counter example, check out the beautiful work that Animeigo did restoring the original Macross series when they released it on DVD a few years ago. The cleaned up print makes the series look like it was ten years newer.
"There's companies that are just so cool that you just can't even deal with it," - Bill Gates, about Google
Or, completely removing scenes from cartoons.
(Ever seen the bugs bunny cartoon where the fish jumps out of the water, pulls a gun on himself and kills himself?)
I patented screwing your mom. But it got revoked for "prior art."
I'm not sure if this is practical, but how hard is it to actually manually add the missing information after the restoration is done ? Just put back the "Missing Vine" and your done :-D
Just re-draw every single cell.
Different process, but similar concepts. Lots of old music recordings get "destroyed" by digital remastering.
In a case like this (with both the cartoons and the music), i would personally put up with hiss, scratches, dirt and pops until they've got the remastering tools perfected.
My $0.02 + 5.5% tax
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I gotta agree with you there kickabear. This is the same argument that people make for not touching up old music. The old analog recordings gave older music a tone, warth, and quality that a lot of nodern digital recordings don't have. A lot of musicians still love the old tube amplifiers for the same reason. True music afficianados listen to Jimi Hendrix in non-remastered form.
They removed the "mammy" voice from the black maid in at least one Tom & Jerry and replaced it with a generic white woman's. Only her legs (black) are shown when she is talking to them. Granted it is mildly racist by today's standards but I'd rather see the original and understand the norms of the time than to be treated like a mindless child who needs to be shielded.
Here's another article about DVNR Screwups with more examples of the problems poor restoration can cause.
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
Although I'm not surprised, I'm disappointed that this isn't part of the standard process. To me, just running the film through DNR is lazy and indicative of a company just trying to make a quick buck. If you want to use a DNR machine, you gotta get a real person to check the work. Period.
I agree, but Disney's talking about manually correcting every single frame and for a 2 hour film you're talking more than 175,000 individual images. That is a huge number of man-hours, and frankly, there's really no need for it.
There's nothing inherently bad about DNR systems. They're a tool, and like any tool they can be used for good or evil. The problems come in when you start asking them to do things that they're not very good at doing - like removing hairs or specks of dust. These objects are not "noise" - which is what "noise reduction" is supposed to get rid of - these are things that do need to be manually removed by somebody that knows that a drawn line and a hair are not the same thing. A computer is not going to make the distinction reliably.
I think ideally what you want to do is light digital noise reduction to reduce noise, and then further manual correction of individual frames that need it (or really, the other way around). There's no reason to manually go through 175,000 frames, though - there should really only be maybe 1,000 or so that would need manual attention on any given film. That's a cost-effective way of ensuring high quality without breaking either the budget or the schedule.
Unfortunately, a lot of studios apparently don't even go that far; they just rely on the computers to do everything. There are still QC monitors at the end of the process, but when all is said and done do you think their complaints that "the picture looks a little fuzzy" are going to be met with anything other than "there's no noise, there's no hairs, ship it out!"?
One of the biggest examples of this I can remember is the Disney cartoon 'Song of the South'. I only saw it while very young, but still remember the songs and characters. Was it really that offensive or just a victim of over zealous censorship.
Just because your paranoid doesn't really mean they aren't out to get you
In that 1952 Tex Avery classic, a character reaches into the edge of the frame to pluck a "hair" from the image. It would be sad to see this gag lost to digital restoration.
I am not a crackpot.
I love how it was so un-PC to have a black stereotype like Mammy but the fix was to make her a an Irish stereotype.
-William Shatner can be neither created nor destroyed.
I mean, there's plenty of jokes about Greedo and Han Solo but no-one has mentioned anything about starfields.
When the remastered Star Wars trilogy came out, I was appalled by the hatchet job they'd performed. In any of the outer space scenes, when the camera panned, the stars changed size. It convinced me that digital remastering was worthless.
However, a few years later I did a module on Computer Graphics at uni and I worked out that the problem was simply that they use point sampling. (I'd already had a vague notion of what must be happening, but couldn't put it into words.)
Throughout the computer world, we use anti-aliasing to try to avoid such size issues and to get rid of jaggy lines; chemical film anti-aliased itself due to its natural area-sampling behaviour; surely it's only natural that when these two worlds meet, we anti-alias our video?
Seemingly not. Even today, "Definition" and "Clarity" are the goals or the digital remasterer (remastermaster?) against all past experience. I recently bought an Italian film on DVD. It had such beautiful scenery -- the cliffs and rock-pools of the Sicilian coast, the clear blue skies and the bone-white stone walls of the houses and fields. The complex motion of the waves on the surface, the shape of the rocks on the bottom and the eratic patterns of light were translated into seemingly random noise if the camera panned slowly across them. Hit the pause button, though, and the picture leapt out from the screen.
I think that's the problem -- the people making decisions on the technology have probably been given stills to compare; so the commercial products would have been designed to produce stunning stills that can be used to sell their products to the production companies, and video would have become a secondary consideration to the developers.
>sigh< ... market forces, eh?
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To be fair the re-release of ET on DVD included a seperate DVD that did show the agents with guns. I would not have purchased the DVD otherwise.
I realize they mean well, but that only causes movements like Neo-Nazism to drive more underground and probably more violent.
At least in the US the KKK is free to roam, and are able to be publicly ridiculed and challenged as a result.
A sentence you'll never see on an Internet discussion board: "You know what? You're right."
You act like this is a new phenomenon. It's not. There are works of Medieval literature where the bad guys were changed from Vikings to Saracens, because Viking raiders are, like, soooooo Eleventh Century, and some Middle Age Akiva Goldsman decided to, like, totally cash in on the whole Crusade fad.
Les Miserables Volume 1 now up with my reading of