[DEUTSCHE Projektbeschreibung]
FRAME
The new beauty of old films
The FRAME digital film restoration system allows quick and cost-
efficient restoration of damaged cinema and video films also capable
of correcting shooting errors thus eliminating the high costs of
reshooting. FRAME is the only existing system of this type.
The Problem
There appears to be no end in sight to the sky-rocketing development
in the communications and TV market.
The business potential yields an increased demand for old film
material and makes archive material commercially very
attractive. According to estimates by the UNESCO there are about 2,2
billion meters of nitro based film material stored world-wide in
archives.
Chemical changes due to the film material's age as well as improper
handling before archiving have caused the irretrievable damage of
almost 90 percent of the silent movies and half of the films produced
before the year 1950.
The solution
The conventional personnel intensive manual digital restoration method
results in unacceptably high costs. The semi-automatic digital film
restoration software LIMELIGHT developed by JOANNEUM RESEARCH has
succeeded in reducing the efforts considerably, however, the process
is still too slow for industrial use. The processing time on a single workstation was 10 minutes per
frame - much too long.
Due to these reasons FRAME, a parallelised digital film restoration
system with processing speed qualified for industrial use, was
developed.
FRAME can perform the following restoration tasks:
- Dust and Dirt Removal
- Noise Suppression
- Image Stabilisation
- Scratch Removal
- Flickering Correction
- Dynamic Density-Correction
- Frame Interpolation
- Colour Conversion
The Digital Film Restoration Process
Film Restoration in General
The industrial factor
The main criterion for the product's commercial acceptance in
industrial use is the speed of the restoration process. In this
context there was a demand for FRAME to achieve a frame processing
rate within maximal 72 seconds (15 seconds for video resolution).
This high standard could only be achieved by applying HPCN
-technologies, which made it possible to beat the demanded time limit
with the result of cutting the restoration costs to a minimum of 400
US$ per minute of film. The costs of digital film restoration are
similar to those of analogue technologies but with the advantage that
the capacities of FRAME far exceed the range of possibilities of
analogue film restoration.
The Costs
Due to the parallelisation of the code, film restauration gets cheaper for the customer because the
processing time could be reduced from 10 minutes per frame (LIMELIGHT) to 72 seconds per single frame
(FRAME):
| |
LIMELIGHT semi-automatic digital restoration |
FRAME semi-automatic digital restauration |
| High resolution film scanning |
30 000 EUR |
30 000 EUR |
| Processing |
150 000 EUR |
30 000 EUR |
| Film recording |
30 000 EUR |
30 000 EUR |
| Total |
210 000 EUR |
30 000 EUR |
The properties of the system
FRAME is a film restoration software offering the following advantages:
- Platform independence. The restoration system runs on different
UNIX-platforms (Digital-UNIX, HP-UX, SGI-IRIX) as well as on Windows
NT (Intel and Alpha)
- The automatic restoration process is supported by predefined
restoration jobs and sequence based image manipulation - with the
possibility of manual interference and handling at any time.
- A graphical user interface in the familiar Windows 95/NT
environment makes the software easy to use, even for the inexperienced
user.
The project
The FRAME Software is based on a film restoration software named
LIMELIGHT developed by JOANNEUM RESEARCH within the EUREKA
program. The ESPRIT project no 24220 FRAME was initiated in July 97 by
the following four partners:
The main goals of the FRAME project:
- Parallelisation of the LIMELIGHT film restoration software for
distributed systems by using the portable Message Passing Interface
(MPI).
- Pilot installation and evaluation of the restoration software
together with the French
Examples of restored films
FRAME has been developed and tested by the restoration of numerous
films, like:
The demand
The FRAME restoration software has already been installed for several
customers, such as:
- LNF, Laboratoire Neyrac Films, Paris
- JR , JOANNEUM RESEARCH, Graz
- fx.Center Babelsberg, Potsdam
Please find more information at
| hsart digital services |
JOANNEUM RESEARCH |
| Walter Plaschzug |
Peter Schallauer |
| Rechbauerstrasse 37, A-8010 Graz |
Steyrergasse 17, A-8010 Graz |
| Tel.: +43 316 822632 |
Tel.: +43 316 876 -1202 |
| Fax: +43 316 826464 |
Fax: +43 316 876 -1191 |
| e-mail: hsart.graz@aon.at |
e-mail: peter.schallauer@joanneum.ac.at |
http://www.joanneum.ac.at/iis
We express our courtesy to the following archives who
furnished us with the pictures used as examples in this brochure:
Filmarchiv Austria: Holzflö:sser auf der Mur, 1938. Pathe: Die Reise
zum Mond (La voyage dans la lune), 1908. Taurus Film: Opernball,
1956.
