Restoring Film: The Art of Bringing Classic Films into the Digital Age

Cameras

Filmmaking and distribution is a walk in the park compared to yesteryear. Image if each time you played back your film you were slowly degrading the quality? You have no playback on set, dailies aren’t on your iPad, your editor is meticulously carrying frames of film and splicing it together by hand.

Films have historically been shot, and stored, on film. It’s been the archival standard since the dawn of the moving picture, but only in the past 2 decades have we started to be able to truly improve the quality of film through digital restoration. It’s a difficult and grueling process, going frame by frame to maintain the best image quality in each frame, and maintaining smooth playback when watched. Keep in mind, these are finished films, already edited, colored, mastered, and distributed. The work of restoring is literally like wiping away the years and damage from each time the film sprockets pass through a machine.

The above 9 minute promo-docu is a fascinating glimpse into a reality where instead of file corruption issues, you have physical damage to your footage that is caused by a number of factors. Universal went through and fixed and cleaned up the the footage from its classic films. Not only do these amazing restoration artists restore damage, they attempt to preserve the natural grain structure of the film to help preserve the integrity of the filmmakers original image.

It’s a really fascinating process seeing films get restored, we owe the recent bluray release of Jaws to the restoration, Steven Spielberg believes it’s a clearer image than the original negative EVER resolved!

Another film recently recovered from near ruin was The Godfather. This film owed lots of its image loss from its unexpected success upon release. The negative was copied beyond usual limits and suffered because of it, eventually destroyed by the repeated process. The process Paramount had to go through to restore the print actually required them to cobble together private collector’s stock of the film and piece together the best version of the movie from multiple prints.

Take some time to appreciate the luxury we have with being able to copy and move our film without degrading the footage in any way. Filmmaking is still full of trials and tribulations but the camera and media have become less of a blockade and more invisible when it comes to the difficulties of filmmaking.

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Jared Abrams is a cinematographer based in Hollywood, California. After many years as a professional camera assistant he switched over to still photography. About two years ago a new Canon camera changed the way the world sees both motion and still photography. He just happened to be in the right place at the right time.