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 We are currently in a renaissance of boutique film distributors investing time and money in releasing cult classics, obscure gems, lost films, and beloved classics for film collectors. With the popularity and affordability of blu-rays and UHD, we are now able to own copies of films with the best picture and sound quality. This is all thanks to the labels willing to hire people who can lovingly and painstakingly restore the films to the best of their abilities. This is a thread for them. There are three definitions that are mistakenly used interchangeably: "restoration", "preservation", and "remastering". Preservation: Until 1950, films were produced using nitrate cellulose film stock, a chemically unstable and flammable material that eventually deteriorates and turns to dust. After 1950, more stable acetate (or safety) film stock was used, but it also deteriorates, giving rise to "vinegar syndrome" or irreversible color fading. (-UCLA Library) Film and television preservation and restoration is often labor intensive and can be costly. The exacting work requires researching the best surviving materials among the world's archives and private collectors, painstakingly comparing and cutting together shots and scenes from diverse sources, repairing splices and perforations, rerecording soundtracks to remove auditory imperfections, tinting silent films in their original colors and restoring faded prints. "Part of the goal is to make a new print or prints so that they can be circulated and screened for the public at film festivals and screening venues around the world. But the ultimate goal is to make a new preprint element—a master positive copy or a dupe negative copy—on modern polyester film that research indicates will last for hundreds of years, and place it in our cold storage vault." — Preservation Officer Robert Gitt from UCLA Library Restoration: The differences between preservation and restoration are subtle, but in the archives world they are profound. If we say that we have preserved a film, we are saying that we have taken steps to protect the integrity and accessibility of the images contained on the film. Preservation actions include storing a film properly in an inert can in cold storage, but they can also include copying the image from a deteriorated film base to a stable one. Successful preservation means that the image we have now is the same as the image we had yesterday, last month, or even decades ago. If we say we have restored a film, we are saying that we have enhanced the film for exhibition. When you watch a film that is scratched or covered with blotches from water damage, these imperfections may distract you from what is happening onscreen. In the digital realm, using specially designed software, we are able to alter the image at the pixel level so that many imperfections disappear. The image looks better, but it is no longer the same as in the original film. (Unwritten-Record.com) Remastering: Remastering refers to changing the quality of the sound or of the image, or both, of previously created recordings, either audiophonic, cinematic, or videographic. It involves going back to the original negative, and trying to reproduce the sights and sounds of the original to how it was hoped to be presented. To put it the differences succinctly: "The restoration specialists get annoyed when Disney just does a new scan of a 90s film and calls it fully restored, when the negative is essentially in the exact same condition as it was then. Likewise, even plenty of older films weren't necessarily needing to be restored, but remastered. The digital cleanup is considered the restoration now." -Egbert Souse This thread is open to discussion of all three definitions. The point is clarified to help discussion (as the terms aren't interchangeable), but they are not the only discussion. This is a place to share videos and articles about film restoration. You can post projects you have heard about that interest you (like that time the Goon restored Manos: The Hands of Fate), or exciting film releases. Post before/after pictures. You can also ask questions and learn some cool poo poo! There was previously a thread by Egbert Souse that you can read here: Emulsion Rescue
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Jul 22, 2020 15:38
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| # ? May 7, 2024 07:34 |
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I've been thinking about making this thread since I watched this video on Shout Factory's release of Sleepaway Camp, showing the process on how they scanned the film in 2k: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwbxVOTBMyM In general, it's a process that fascinates me, and which I find soothing to watch and read about, but I don't really know too much about it. So I hope this thread is a fun way to discuss it and share other cool videos like this. Here's another one about the 4k Restoration of It's A Wonderful Life Franchescanado fucked around with this message at 15:45 on Jul 22, 2020 |
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Jul 22, 2020 15:41
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What the gently caress is going on in the film at the top?  I used to know someone that worked in the film archives at UCLA and they said the most fun and most rear end-clenching days were when they had to get out the old nitrate prints. Also yes! I expect a lot of fun reads from you and Egbert.
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Jul 22, 2020 15:52
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FilthyImp posted:What the gently caress is going on in the film at the top? It was improperly stored
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Jul 22, 2020 15:54
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I don't know if this is the right place for it, but maybe: What's the difference between film grain and "noise"? A friend of mine was watching Evil Dead on some streaming service and was complaining about it looking all fuzzy and terrible compared to a DVD he had. I explained that it was probably just film grain and when he asked what that was I realized I had no loving idea.
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Jul 22, 2020 15:57
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Biff Rockgroin posted:I don't know if this is the right place for it, but maybe: Film grain is in the structure of the film itself. It varies by the size/type/quality of film but it's always there in photographic film. A DVD can blur out fine film grain while a HD digital image (like a blu-ray or 4K video of an old film) might make it visible, but it was always there on the film itself. On the other hand a digital stream might look like rear end because the digital data is overly compressed or your internet connection can't just push enough bits fast enough to maintain the image. In that case the image can get garbled in various minor or major ways that are noise. Old analog TV sets with bad reception to distant stations would also have all kinds of visual garbage in the picture that you'd call "noise." 
sean10mm fucked around with this message at 16:41 on Jul 22, 2020 |
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Jul 22, 2020 16:34
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Biff Rockgroin posted:I don't know if this is the right place for it, but maybe: It’s (generally) the same thing. From Wikipedia: quote:[Film stock] is a strip or sheet of transparent plastic film base coated on one side with a gelatin emulsion containing microscopically small light-sensitive silver halide crystals. The sizes and other characteristics of the crystals determine the sensitivity, contrast and resolution of the film. The more of and finer the crystals, the sharper the picture. This is why larger film (like 70mm) looks so much better. Low light situations will always look noisier since the crystals have to be bigger to pick up any of the available light, resulting in a coarser image. The end result on home formats is paradoxically that higher res formats typically show more grain. The lower the digital resolution, the larger the film surface area that is averaged for each pixel. For UHDs, I think we’re at the point where for some 35mm film there are more pixels than crystals; IE we’ve maxed out the detail on the film. Even in cases where this isn’t true (like 70mm film) I don’t think a resolution bump beyond 4K would be noticeable. I’ll give an example from my experience with the 1933 King Kong. I upgraded the DVD to the Blu-Ray version and it was unexpectedly a massive improvement. King Kong is a very grainy film and DVD simply didn’t have enough resolution to deal with it, resulting in a picture where the brightness strobed kind of oddly due to how the waves of grain were averaged together. All of that was gone on the Blu-Ray. Someone more knowledgeable can probably talk about how film stocks have improved over the years or actual dirt on the film itself.
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Jul 22, 2020 16:44
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A bit off the beaten path, but my main entry point for preservations and restorations over the years has been the Original Trilogy discussion boards, which started as Star Wars fan edits and preservations but has over the years expanded to a general amateur preservationist forum. The main subforum for projects is here. Some folks focus on preserving TV edits of films, some restore the cuts of theatrical versions which were changed for home release, some restore original color timing for films which were over-graded on home release, some buy 16mm trailers on eBay and preserve them, and some painstakingly restore previously unreleased content in HD. No piracy discussion there so you'll have to track the releases down yourself if you actually want to watch them, but if this kind of thing is your jam there are invaluable resources and discussion all over that forum. Perhaps the most notable restorations that originated there are the 4K77 folks who have released restored 4K scans of the original Star Wars trilogy. I've really enjoyed watching some videos on their YouTube channel. Some of the videos go into the sort of excruciating detail I adore such as removing cue marks, de-warping frames, scratch removal, dirt and dust removal, and much more. I'm sure professional restoration work is a good degree more advanced than this much of the time, but if you love getting into the weeds like me you'll probably enjoy this insight into the process.
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Jul 22, 2020 18:14
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Sharing my favorite restoration video, The Apu Trilogy.
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Jul 22, 2020 18:22
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Is this the thread we complain about the Ritrovata turning every old European and now asian film they can grab into looking like piss?
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Jul 22, 2020 19:05
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Electronico6 posted:complain about the Ritrovata turning every old European and now asian film they can grab into looking like piss? I really want this to be a probatable offense. EDIT: This should be required viewing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUOLxjaEcvw VoodooXT fucked around with this message at 19:35 on Jul 22, 2020 |
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Jul 22, 2020 19:13
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https://cartoonresearch.com/index.php/category/thunderbean-thursday/ These guys do old cartoon restorations/sets and post about how they do it and some of the obscure-er stuff they find. Related to cartoons, warner brothers has been putting out color popeye restorations. I was reading that one had restored vibrant greens that had been totally washed out to red. How do restorers even extrapolate accurate color information out of something like that? Chemically? Guesswork?
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Jul 22, 2020 19:48
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FunkyAl posted:I was reading that one had restored vibrant greens that had been totally washed out to red. How do restorers even extrapolate accurate color information out of something like that? Chemically? Guesswork? You can usually tell which color layer is fading. Like in the pic in the OP, the magenta layer is pretty weak because the cyan and yellow layers are generally intact (you can see cyan in the blues, and you clearly have green in the frame so that means the yellow layer is still good since cyan and yellow make green). As for how to restore something (generally speaking), you usually go back as close to OCN as possible if the OCN is not available, which is either YCM color separations on B&W film made from the OCN or interpositives since those are one generation away from the OCN. You might be able to balance it back by adjusting the level of the scanner lights but you can't really add something back in if it's not there anymore. VoodooXT fucked around with this message at 20:07 on Jul 22, 2020 |
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Jul 22, 2020 19:58
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Here's a co-founder of The Film Foundation, Marty something or other, I dunno, he does some other side job thing, founded TFF with some Jewish guy named Steve, talking about restoring The Red Shoes, still one of the most impressive jobs I've seen, up there with the 4K of Wizard of Oz or what I remember being the Wages of Fear's restoration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MutSl2dFE0E
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Jul 22, 2020 21:21
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It's not anything super mind blowing but How It's Made did a segment on this that's pretty cool. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E4aZ5fCqLf8
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Jul 22, 2020 22:11
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Per the experts who work on restorations of films, the general idea is to get as close as possible to premiere quality and also what the filmmaker intends. I've read a lot on major projects that required a ton of research, lab work, and even redubbing to make complete. What's even more important is preservation. Not just digital, but on film. Paramount actually preserves their films with an iron-clad method. Reference prints at multiple archives, color separations, duplicate negatives, interpositives, and obviously the camera negative. Even for digitally shot films, they output a negative to preserve since digital isn't going to ever be as sure as film. Electronico6 posted:Is this the thread we complain about the Ritrovata turning every old European and now asian film they can grab into looking like piss? I forget which podcast, but Lee Kline talked about Japanese films and how their use of color in the 50s and 60s was quite different from the usual American or even European films. Even with B&W, they generally weren't going for inky blacks, but rather a lighter contrast. I'll stay out of what's correct or not, but in general I trust it to be correct in the hands of Criterion and others. Ritrovata did the 4K restoration of Playtime and the color is perfect. Tati intended the film to generally look like B&W with only sporadic color like flesh tones and specific items. The overall blue cast of the older photochemical restoration is gone and instead there's a warmer, but more neutral look. FunkyAl posted:https://cartoonresearch.com/index.php/category/thunderbean-thursday/ In general, original prints are referenced whenever possible for color. In the case of the Popeye cartoons, the people at WB were horrified to find out that there were no actual backup elements on the color Popeye cartoons. When Paramount sold them to AAP in the 50s, apparently they sent over the camera negatives and optical track negatives, from which AAP made new printing masters. Except they didn't. Instead, they were given a dye-transfer print of each cartoon and they spliced in their logo to replace Paramount's. All the 16mm prints were made from the "master". So nobody ever made fine-grain positives, interpositives, etc. at any point. On the plus side, this also meant the negatives were in generally pristine condition since they hadn't been touched since the 40s and Technicolor generally handled film extremely well. Technicolor (and similar processes of the time) used B&W film and for animation, generally it was via "Successive Exposure" which means instead of three strips of film like live-action, it was all on a single reel with each frame exposed three times under a color filter. So you'd have yellow, magenta, and cyan as successive frames of the same actual moment. This also has the advantage of making it easy to line up since instead of three reels that could have different geometry due to shrinkage, it's all on one strip of film. I do recall that one Popeye cartoon was produced in Polacolor and somehow one color record was lost over the years, so they did the best they could digitally. It also had water damage, but I was amazed by how well they managed to make it look good. Only artifact I could see was that the colors seemed to pulse slightly, but nothing like the bad lineup we'd see on old masters.
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Jul 23, 2020 00:38
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At the risk of plugging my own stuff: I’ve done a few very amateur color restorations of missing sequences from Peter Bogdanovich’s notorious (actually really good) flop At Long Last Love from 16mm prints. I don’t have a film scanner, so it’s all “projected on the wall” type stuff, but given how faded the original Eastman color print I have is I’m pretty happy with how it came out. It Ain’t Etiquette and a missing verse of Tomorrow.
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Jul 23, 2020 01:59
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Biff Rockgroin posted:I don't know if this is the right place for it, but maybe: Another thing to consider is DNR - Digital Noise Reduction. So, as others have mention, film naturally has grain, and that grain can look a bit noisy. So, it's not uncommon to use DNR to reduce the grain. And like a lot of things, using too much can end up making the picture look terrible, because you're literally losing detail in order to lose the grain. Here's an example of Patton. The original blu-ray release used too much DNR, and it basically made everything look blurry and smeary. The remastered release uses less DNR, so there's more grain, but there's now more detail: https://caps-a-holic.com/c.php?a=1&x=605&y=223&d1=1744&d2=1743&s1=16391&s2=16381&l=0&i=7&go=1 Here's the downside of streaming services - they loving suck when it comes to quality control. Basically, they get whatever they get from the studios, so they might get the OAR version, or they might get a version prepared to run on TV that's has the imaged futz with and cropped to 16:9. I remember trying to watch From Russia with Love on Netflix, and it was a smeary, low detailed mess. The Blu-Ray looked much better. So it's possible your friend was watching a version of the Evil Dead that had a ton of DNR applied, which will hurt the image. edit: for Patton, here's another bad image: https://caps-a-holic.com/c.php?a=1&x=694&y=188&d1=1744&d2=1743&s1=16389&s2=16379&l=0&i=5&go=1 The DNR doesn't look too bad on smaller elements that are lower detailed, but stuff that's closer to the camera and has much higher detail? You can see the DNR get rid of so much of that stuff. The guy Patton is talking too loses all of his wrinkles thanks to DNR. Cemetry Gator fucked around with this message at 05:26 on Jul 23, 2020 |
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Jul 23, 2020 05:24
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I remember the Predator Blu-ray was horrifically bad because of DNR. I think that's also why I was confused about film grain in the first place. Digital Noise Reduction reduces film grain, but also, film grain apparently isn't noise. All I got from Google was that "noise" has the wrong colors and grain has more neutral tones, but it was hard for me to grasp what counted as "wrong" at first. I think I get it now though.
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Jul 23, 2020 05:33
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While there's always some noise reduction needed for mastering to Blu-ray, there is absolutely zero reason to do anything but the minimum to basically take the edge off raw scans. One thing that has impressed me about Blu-ray is how well it handles film grain. DVD required some extremely careful encoding to not turn film grain into blockiness, but on Blu-ray, I'm impressed with how organic it looks. There is processing that can be done to "even out" film grain, but it's carefully handled. For example, many restorations have to blend camera negative, interpositives, and even duplicate negative. Instead of having huge disparity between elements, they may "massage" the lower quality sections to look closer like the camera negative.
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Jul 23, 2020 05:40
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Egbert Souse posted:I forget which podcast, but Lee Kline talked about Japanese films and how their use of color in the 50s and 60s was quite different from the usual American or even European films. Even with B&W, they generally weren't going for inky blacks, but rather a lighter contrast. I'll stay out of what's correct or not, but in general I trust it to be correct in the hands of Criterion and others. Ritrovata has been using their yellow/teal color grading for almost every color film they can grab these days, regardless of when, where, and how they were made. Here's a good case, where the color grading on the Criterion was done by them, while Arrow took charge themselves(?) on their release. http://www.dvdbeaver.com/film6/blu-ray_reviews_74/the_tree_of_wooden_clogs_blu-ray.htm They're doing this color correcting in every film, usually backing it with that the director/DP intended or supervised, but all Ritrovata color titles get this color grading treatment so is it really being intended by the director/DP? Restoration to watch for is Wong Kar-Wai's movies, which are being done by the Ritrovata, however they are NOT doing the color grading, so I'm betting that Wong movies aren't going to get the Ritrovata brand look.
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Jul 23, 2020 09:46
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Biff Rockgroin posted:I remember the Predator Blu-ray was horrifically bad because of DNR. No, film grain is noise. Noise is basically anything that isn't the signal, which in this case would be the picture. So in the Patton example, the image of the man would be signal, and the grain would be noise. Just like macro blocking, ringing, and other artifacts of compression would be noise as well, or film scratches or splices. The problem with DNR is that at some point, it gets very hard to automatically tell the difference between noise and fine detail. Take the wrinkles on the man's face. It's easy to see how an image enhancer that's just looking for noise gets confused, so it ends up removing that. You see this happen with other examples. The first release of Gladiator had arrows being erased when they were flying through the air. It also gets into other weird questions. For example, is film grain part of the picture? I would argue that it is, similar to how brush strokes and the texture of a canvas is part of the painting. It's just a technical part of how film looks. And there are films that look good that have significant noise removal. Aliens is an example. But Cameron has insane amounts of money and can afford to have people go frame by frame and work meticulously to preserve the image while removing the grain. And even still, grain remains because there's only so far you can go.
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Jul 23, 2020 14:35
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| # ? May 7, 2024 07:34 |
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Electronico6 posted:Ritrovata has been using their yellow/teal color grading for almost every color film they can grab these days, regardless of when, where, and how they were made. Here's a good case, where the color grading on the Criterion was done by them, while Arrow took charge themselves(?) on their release. L'immagine ritrovata did the restoration with supervision from Ermanno Olmi and I wouldn't necessarily put much stock in what Arrow says is correct. Arrow has been known in the past to fudge facts or assumptions to fit their narrative of what they did. Arrow claims they used an original 35mm release print as reference to how it looked, which is a huge mistake because release prints are all over the place in terms of color and brightness. It's one of the reasons why you hear cinematographers complain about release prints, especially from that time period: release prints generally never looked close to what the cinematographers were aiming for in terms of the look. At least from the DVDBeaver screencaps, you can tell there are shots that are brighter than they're supposed to be in the Arrow release since the black levels are milky as gently caress, or they're super grainy which means they were meant to be printed down in the optical printer to hide the grain. Cemetry Gator posted:For example, is film grain part of the picture? I would argue that it is, similar to how brush strokes and the texture of a canvas is part of the painting. It's just a technical part of how film looks. It absolutely is since those grains are what are capturing the light to create the image on film, but you do have to do something with the grain though since it tends to look really sharp, especially if it's off the OCN. Back when the image to release print was a completely photochemical process, the generational loss of an analog process helped to soften/diffuse the grain so it wasn't as in-your-face; nowadays you just use a little bit of noise reduction to soften it. One of the most interesting things I've seen done in post now is that images will go with a noise reduction process to eliminate grain and then have a grain pattern overlaid on top of that so you have the grain, but it's controllable so you can dial in how much grain you want in the shot and you can make everything have a uniform grain pattern.
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Jul 23, 2020 18:57
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