I was recently asked by a fan, "what do you mean when you say that your videos has been 'digitally restored?'"
Well, I spend a good portion of my time working on just that. And, to my certain knowledge, other historic film publishers don't bother to take the time (including much of what you see on the cable channels), so I decided our fans should see the difference. I put together six pages of "before and after" sample shots from a few of the videos we have restored to show what I mean.
A little background. Unfortunately, most film shot during World War II has not been well preserved until recently. Over time historic film copies will change for the worse. (You can see that in the color slides your parents took when your were a kid.) In color films, that means color shifts that give a pink, blue, green or yellow haze or fading. Black and white film can darken or lighten, the picture has a haze, and contrast is lost so the image is flat gray with little tonal range. Very few of the original negatives for these pictures have survived, so prints are often grainy and blurred because they are copies of copies.
The good news is that with the right equipment along with plenty of time & expertise, many of these effects can be substantially reduced, if not completely eliminated. Corrections are relative to the kind and amount of damage that has been done, but the results can be truly amazing. Color shifts can be undone, noise levels reduced, tonal balance restored, and the hiss in the sound track eliminated. This can involve many extra days in the editing room for a twenty-minute film for a shot-by-shot restoration. And it can take 8-hours or more to render digital changes to that 20-minute film on a fast computer.
So why do we spend all this extra time, money and effort when others don't? Because I am a fan of these films and I know how much difference this technology can make. The first time I saw the dramatic results, I was hooked.
See for yourself!
Zeno
