Film Restoration

Screengrab from Blu-Ray restoration of "How The West Was Won" (smilebox version)
Screengrab from Blu-Ray restoration of “How The West Was Won” (smilebox version)

Ah restorations and remasters. I love ’em! (As evidenced by my continual project of digitizing and retouching my Dad’s photographic collection.)

Film remasters, audio remasters, photographic restorations, everything. It’s breathing new life into something old and making it look and sound the best it can, either by taking the original film stock, audio tape, or photograph, and giving it a high-resolution digital transfer that captures every detail.

(When it comes to film, the ironic thing is that once they’ve finished the digital restoration, a copy of that restoration goes right back onto new fine-grain film stock, and a digital copy goes into a server storage farm. This is due to the fact that long-term digital storage is shaky and formats change frequently.)

I’ve always wanted to get into the field, but there’s a lot to learn. A lot of time and work goes into restorations and remasters (film in particular).

To show just what goes into film restoring, I wandered around YouTube and found some videos that I believe detail the process fairly well.

(There are a number of them!) [Warning: Flash player ahead!]

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