ATTN HPCN-TTN

Film Restoration in General

Many old films of cultural value are steadily decaying and will be lost if no effort is taken to preserve or restore them for future generations. In fact, close to 90% of the silent cinema (before 1930), and 50% of all the film produced before 1950 are irretrievably lost by now. To cope with this problem, research efforts are made not only on film preservation, but also on restoring already lost or damaged information on motion pictures.

Since films run at 24 frames/second and one frame of a high-resolution 35-mm color film consists of 45 MBytes of data, the restoration of one hour of film needs processing of 3.9 TBytes of data in 86400 frames turning motion picture restoration into a labor-intensive, costly undertaking. For example, in the beginning of digital film restoration, the processing of Snow White (Walt Disney, 1937) took 18 weeks using 40 workstations 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and costed 7 Million Dollar.

A lot of useful information about film restoration and preservation can be found in the AMC Film Preservation FAQ.

Useful links about film restoration and image processing: