How Old Movies Are Professionally Restored | Movies Insider
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- Опубліковано 16 лют 2022
- All film stocks decompose over time. Sometimes this decomposition is irreversible - which explains why an estimated 75% of American silent films are considered lost. We visited The George Eastman Museum in Rochester, New York, to see how its team rescues old movies and restores them to their former glory.
The Eastman Museum runs one of the world's top film-preservation programs. Its archives of over 28,000 films include the personal collections of directors like Spike Lee and Martin Scorsese and carefully controlled nitrate vaults containing over 26 million feet of film.
The museum's preservation projects include the silent films of Cecil B. DeMille and Georges Méliès, along with Stanley Kubrick's first film, "Fear and Desire," from 1953, and Orson Welles' once-lost work "Too Much Johnson," from 1938. Its recent restoration of the 1935 Oscar Micheaux film "Murder in Harlem" screened at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival.
For more from The George Eastman Museum, visit:
www.eastman.org/moving-image
/ georgeeastmanmuseum
/ eastmanmuseum
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How Old Movies Are Professionally Restored | Movies Insider
Everytime i see something like this i get that irresistable urge to work at a museum, like underfund me i dont care i just wanna preserve history alv
I had the same thought!
Sounds like you are in the wrong career.
@@Gnefitisis I feel like this too - but it's so hard to actually get a job related to history
Alv indeed jajajajajaja
@@SharonRaeRyan mee too bro
This is a great documentary - I would love to see how older movies are restored to 4K for Blu-Ray releases as well!
To be honest, most "restorations" for distribution are taking the best materials, digitizing them, and doing cleanup. Then the digital file is taken to be authored and compressed to Blu-Ray standards and pressed at disc replication plants. This is a far more complicated restoration using many sources, but the final digital file you see the archive produce here would just go through the same authoring and compression for Blu-ray. (With a new music score added, of course, since it's a silent film.)
They're relatively simple compared to restoring silent movies from the early 20th century. Oftentimes, they use the original camera negative (which is the actual film that went through the camera when it was shot) because it offers the highest possible image quality. These are then scanned using a film scanner which are then converted into single digital images per frame. Then, those digital frames get cleaned by software and once they're done, they are put into Blu-ray discs.
What's the point of making 4K versions for very old movies when they weren't recorded in 4K in the first place? Will you get sharper pixel at all than, say 1080p? You'll just wasting bytes.
@@maximodakila2873, I look at a lot of different tests, and most films shot in 35mm will have greater detail when scanned in 4K. With 16mm, it depends on the film itself.
There’s a video that technology connections made about those 4K restorations. I can’t link it without UA-cam getting antsy but you should be able to find it by searching the term along with his channel name
Restoration of any form of art is paramount. Thanks for sharing this!
I remember my time as an intern. During that time I repaired 16mm films in our local media lending office. It was really a very nice job. Now after my film studies I could imagine this work in restoration. Where can I apply? :D
George Eastman House in Rochester NY.
Fantastic. I honestly like both versions: unrestored version and restored version
Restored: making the movie look a lot better and more natural, looking like they came out in theaters
Unrestored: nostalgic
I know this sounds weird but when it comes to movies that were released during let's say since the 50s onward, I like the unrestored version for the nostalgia as you said(given not ignoring later damage caused by use), for movies older than that like let's say the silent era, cause there was let's say a lot of damage to the source material, they'd require restoring which should still perserve grains/film feel as much as possible. Not sure how much that makes sense or/and accurate but that's my take on it.
There are channels that carry these type films, not all this old, but 1930s-50s, and I often turn them on in the background out of interest and curiosity. Thanks so much to those who do this valuable work to preserve this history.
This is effectively what I've been doing in my bedroom over the last few years. I have about 30 or so very small reels of nitrate that I'm currently digitizing.
Why did they use nitrate if they degrade so quickly? They didnt think it through?
@@fynkozari9271 It takes a few decades before it starts degrading
@@fynkozari9271 It was the first plastic base for film. Diacetate and triacetate came later and those also suffer from a form of degradation called Vinegar Syndrome.
@@fynkozari9271They weren't thinking of the future. They wanted a quick sell and then on to the next one, like rock and roll 45s. Keep churning 'em out. They don't have to last. The same thing was done in recording studios. Magnetic tape masters of great singers were erased to reuse the tapes, which were expensive. Some historic recordings have had to be restored from 78- or 33- discs because the masters are gone. Hardly the best media to restore from.
Wow! I live near the George Eastman house and never knew this work was being done there. kudos to these wonderful restoration people.
People in the past might never thought their simple actions would create a lot of works for the people in the future.
That's a crazy amount of professional work - but well worth the effort
Great results 👍🏼
Somehow never mentioned: Nitrate's unfortunate tendency to self-combust, which led to countless film warehouse fires. Nitrate is the "N" in TNT, for reference sake. So combustible it can readily be made explosive.
Oops. Big chemistry misinformation here. The 'N' in TNT (trinitrotoluene) is for "nitro", not nitrate. And there's a huge difference between the two. A nitro group, NO2, is uncharged (neutral), whereas nitrates such as nitrocellulose are esters of nitric acid (-O-NO2) that bear local + and - charges that create mutual attraction between neighboring molecules. Nitrate films are made of nitrocellulose, i.e. cellulose nitrate, obtained by reacting cellulose with nitric and sulfuric acid. The name "nitrocellulose", although still used is misleading, as there are no nitro groups involved in the structure, only nitrate radicals (hence the proper name is indeed cellulose nitrate, and nitrate films are correctly named). Thus, TNT is an uncharged, nitro aromatic compound, whereas cellulose nitrate is a nitrate ester, like nitroglycerin (another misnomer as it has no nitro group, and the ingredient of dynamite), a totally different beast.
The explosive mechanisms between nitrocellulose and TNT are also COMPLETELY different. Basically, nitrocellulose is the main component (and active ingredient) of modern smokeless gunpowder. Nitrocellulose was used to make film support for photography mainly because it is actually the earliest plastic invented. If safety had been a concern, a different support would have been developed much earlier.
Fun appendix: I have loved chemistry since my youngest age. I even built my own lab with another crackpot like me when I was about to enter college. Our specialty was making polymers, but as a fun side project, to draw attention to us and impress chicks 😂, we made TNT, which is awfully easy. We detonated a small container of it using a homemade wick. It was a lot of fun. Nice clean fun. But don't try this at home, kids, OK? 😊
@@raminagrobis6112 i thoroughly enjoyed this comment
Oh wow always wondered how they restore old film incredible how they can do it nowadays
I would hope that they run the scanning system 24/7/365. Since time is the enemy, I would be digitizing as much existing film now, and doing all of the processing steps later.
Film restoration and digitization takes more than just popping every reel into a scanner, hoping for the best and keeping whatever files come out. And digital images also degrade over time. The ideal thing to do would be to copy the films onto newer polyester film stock, but it's extremely expensive.
U missed 52 weeks 12 months.
@@SofiaFP no, digital data certainly does not degrade. The storage medium might fail decades down the line, however. But there is a solution for that: copy it in time.
Budget
Ganiscol digital films do degrade and at such a fast rate, the library of Congress preserves film on actual film even if it was shot on digital. 3 RBG super long lasting physical film reels can last 125+ yeats
It makes me appreciate old classic movies even more and be able to see them :)
This is just awesome I love history in films music and just history in general I love the fact that there are people out there that try so hard to keep it alive
I'm so jealous of people who have jobs like this.
It's like a hobby but you get paid. What a life.
Fantastic efforts in preserving the art through vintage films. I love the techiques they store the films so it be safe and sound - in moving cupboards 😁 High tech. Wish I could adapting the same on cupboard in my home. Saving space and so organized! I remember to see Roman Holiday sparkling clear in DVD many moons ago. What these guys do requiring hypotesis and analysis so the dirt and chemicals gone without messing with the integrity of the original presentations. Sometimes they restored the credit names of crews that were banned during the release of that particular film. I think it is nice gestures. Kudos
I love watching how they restore very old films. :) It's like a time machine.
Amazing work..!! Thank you for the update, Insider..!!
This is fascinating to watch - and kudos to the George Eastman restoration team for doing such a great job! 😊
Now that's what I call remastering the movies!
I for one would like to say thankyou for preserving these films for people to see. Good day and Rock on!
Salute to the whole team.
I needed this! It’s what I was wondering for a very long time!
I would love to see a UA-cam channel or podcast based on film restoration! This was interesting!
PBS featured an 1hr + long English language documentary on film preservation one evening. It was probably made in the 90s. I cannot find it to save my life but I wish I could watch it again.
So excited for the new video from y’all!
As an analog enthusiast i really loved this video
Great work!
Very cool! This is important work in my opinion because it's part of American heritage. Great work from that team!
I wonder how much further Peter Jackson could take this in truly bringing it back to life after what he was able to do with WW1 footage for They Shall Not Grow Old? I know the goal of the museum is artifact-level preservation but I would love to see something like this given a high-dollar true-to-life restoration.
lord of the ring also
This is true restoration as it does not alter a film beyond the original filmmaker's intent. What Peter Jackson did wasn't true restoration, but manipulation. This true-to-the-original restoration is how these films should be preserved and believe me, it isn't cheap.
This is great work.
Amazing work
The fact that this came up in my recommendations a day after I started watching Archive 81 on Netflix has got my Timbers shivering
So so glad they can do this
This reminds me of Archive 81, beautiful show
It's such a good show
I went to William S. Hart High School and his home and much of his land are preserved as a museum. Cool
Great video!
This is actually so cool!😊
I love movies.
Some of these gone to dvd, really amazing✌️
Very interesting topic
This is so cool!!
This video is so satisfying!
Some feel good shtuff before the weekend 👍
All those films were once seen in high definition black and white by audiences a hundred years ago.
This was really interesting.
The Philippines is also doing these kinds of works for the Philippine Cinema, it's so sad that the TV Station funding a majority of the endeavor got closed due to political reasons.
Well, its that TV station's fault for whoring out to foreign powers. The government should have nationalized the endeavor. We need to invest in arta and culture like the Chinese to bolster nationalism against foreign meddling.
Amazing for a Nation that care for preservation of its culture.
Interesting. I wonder if they still use the wet gate process, where the film is run through dry cleaner solution (perchloroethylene) to fill in scratches.
I'm surprised how many restored movies that is released on streaming services, but not on Blu-Ray.
Physical media releases are expensive, and the market for these types of films is small and niche.
*OMG THATS SO AMAZING ❤️*
Eddie Muller mentions the UCLA restoration labs. I suppose that they do similar work. This was a very interesting video considering the noir films from the 1940s that we watch so much.
Unmentioned but part of any discussion is the practice of early distributors, theater chain owners and studios/producers concerning silent films which ended their scheduled run. Most often they were either disposed of or the silver in them salvaged or the film reprocessed. Only a few directors, studios and star actors saved the negatives or the volatile nitrate film itself if they had a fireproof film vault. This documentary highlights the other problem: the unsafe nature and fragility of nitrate film to deterioration and spontaneous combustion.
Amazing!
Software name
I hope I get into their school and can aid this process
The guy restoring the silent films looks like an older Larry Sanders
Very nice 👍
Interesting!
Now let's get Pinto Ben on blu ray... maybe from Criterion
Which software is it that is shown at 5.38 ?
That’s a job that must take superhuman levels of patience.
I recommend a page of madness
A art of a movie brought back
Yay top 112 comments. Love this channel. Great work. Best to all.
What's the software called he works in?
What is this program at 9min 5:35?
Are these uploaded online?
perfect
*I was wondering if they were going to keep the finished film for scanning in the future, when scanners will have even higher resolution.* And they develop software that recognizes what was filmed to better restore the images.
I'm interested in how this process is done with talkies. I know that film strips could contain audio in the post silent film era, but how is the sound for a film restored?
Historically, in most instances sound has been recorded separately to the picture. In the analogue era this was first done by recording to wax disk, cylinder, then magnetic tape.
When archiving soundtracks in the 20th century quarter inch magnetic tape recording was often transferred to “mag film”, which was/ is a magnetic oxide surface covering an entire sprocketed film.
In this digital era film sound is created as an audio file; although some sound recordists and sound designers still prefer the “non-clinical” quality of tape recordings, even when these recordings are transferred to digital files for editing and mixing.
Nice
0:20 am i the only one that think George Eastman Museum looked like Willam Afton
I compare it to the smell of formaldehyde when used to preserve the items for dissection
Is that PF Clean with which they digitally restoring the scanned film?
I wonder if George Eastman House uses Diamant or if it's mostly custom software made in house?
Back in the 70s the Sydney movie lab where I worked restored the first Australian colour feature 'Jedda', shot in 1954 on Gevacolor, an unmasked colour negative based on the wartime German Agfacolor. It was all broken down into shot by shot RGB separations and the lab brought an older grader out of retirement to oversee the job. He would eyeball each cut and call for separations to be processed at modified gammas where needed so that when they were optically overlaid back onto Eastmancolor dupe negative and colour graded on a colour video analyzer they looked as closely as possible like the print. I believe it took over 6 months.
Many years later the lab restored the tinted and toned 1927 classic feature 'For the Term of His Natural Life' from a recently discovered print again onto Eastmancolor. My boss oversaw this and I had the pleasure of seeing it presented in the State Theatre, a 1929 movie palace with its score performed by a palm court orchestra. It was one of those moments you never forget. Both of these films had previously been feared lost. This was back in the 1970s where the Australian film industry was being reborn and we all knew the time was running out for old nitrate prints long forgotten in cinema projection rooms and film libraries in what was called 'The Last Film Search'. That was almost 50 years ago.
Although the handling of fragile, flammable nitrate film is still tricky, digital scanning replaces printers with register pins that needed serviceable perforations and digital restoration programs with noise, blotching, float and scratch removal and colour dye fade restoration software make this process interactive, unlike the wedge-print-process-check-redo photo-optical days. I would imagine that the restoration standards are higher today than they were back then to ensure that the scale of the problem has grown to fit the new tools at hand. So I guess it's still a slow, tedious process but films we would have been unable to restore back then stand a chance today - if the nitrate survived or the acetate hasn't suffered vinegar syndrome or the colour dyes haven't faded to the point of being unusable.
I must visit George Eastman House someday soon.
This is not only about preserving the art form of the 20th century but a nation's cultural history.
Great video - thanks for this!
can any one name the software used for restoration process?
I really wish George Eastman museum could restore the Michael Rockefeller documentary
wurtzite boron nitride (w-BN)
I don't care if i have to start at sweeping and mopping the floor of this place....i want a job there😉👌🏿
For the love of God, give the narrator a decent microphone.
Are there private enterprises doing this for private individuals? I have an early 2000s film on VHS that was never released, never digitised and I fear I will loose it overtime.
Definitely try Legacy Box.
@@andysilvers9532 NO. These people will RUIN your films.
@@tsuyunobradley4439 It sounds like you had a bad experience. If so, I'm sorry to hear that.
looked it up and theres a bunch of articles about how to rip from VHS, apparently some big stores can do it for you too. id look into everything carefully, though. make sure you know what youre doing before trying it yourself, or make sure youre certain youre sending it somewhere safe.
@@piss4429 I'd recommend getting a good SuperVHS deck and a capture card that takes S-Video and has good capture quality. Do it yourself. Don't let others take your tapes.
where and how can i sign up for a job doing this?
😊great
What is that software at 6:16??
quisiera saber lo mismo, si alguien sabe le agradecería mucho
William Shart
Funny that Kubrick spent so much time trying to destroy Fear and Desire, only to have it rescued by film preservationists. 😂 poetic justice
5:37 witch software sir
PFClean
*Which
software name ??
I understand when US or other country movies/shows on film are 100 years old and it's degraded, what I don't understand is Japanese taking a lot of effort to manually hand draw an animation in the 70's - 90's only for letting the film rot later when they could make a remaster blu ray release of it but, they choose not to do that because upscaling from DVD is cheaper and thus loosing what could be a digital master of what's still left from 30-50 years old film before it completely rots away
How many are done a year
That 16mm is gonna be Acetate Safety film.
dream job
Wow
❤❤❤
Always renew the copyright and clean up the entire film strip to restore on internet and home video.
That’s my dream job.
Do they reprint the restored version back to film
Digital file, although great, cannot last for decades, because the tehnology to view it will change too fast
I have a question.
I know that when digitizing film, it is scanned and restored, then color graded and mastered.
Is there a case of removing scratches or dust after color grading first? If that was the case, what was the reason?
I think it will cause image loss and incorrect digital cinema workflow. So I think it should be avoided.
My understanding is that when it comes to digitally restoring a film, after it is digitized, work is done to fix any sort of damage to the film. Such as dirt and dust and scratches in tears and mold and oil and chemical staining and anything else that’s on the film. Once that damage is complete, then they go through the process of color grading the film.
Workflow :
1. Hand and chemical clean then Scanned the footage
2. Pre colour grade ( for know the actual details and defects)
3. Restoration ( for remove all kinds of film defects and flaws)
4. Apply Final colour grade
5. Final mastering
6. Making output formats.
* we can’t find what are the actual restoration defects having in that footage. So, we pre colour grade and send the graded footage to restoration. It will be very easy to find and addressed all kinds of restoration defects like dust, scratches and flickering, chemical stains and patches.
If we working on without pre colour grade footage (raw footage), the restoration defects addressed portions are getting artefacts and it’s visible in restored output.
If the footage conditions is too worst, then we can apply the colour grade at two times . That’s better. Others wise we suggest to one time grade at before restoration.
Imagine if they have a copy of London after midnight without knowing
Older films: Needs restoration
Restoration: Very standard
Peter Jackson: Hold my camera!
What software is that?
pfclean. it's US $9,999.
Anyone know the name of the software?
Cool lol
-rainbow 2022 Feb 17th