digital restoration
Film is a long-lived but fragile medium: film components, whether produced a hundred years ago or much more recently have almost certainly deteriorated in a number of ways. Digital technology can be used to repair many defects, restoring the images to their original condition before recording the results back out to film for long-term preservation, or for use in manufacturing new cinema prints.
Efilm Australia and Atlab, working together, have skills in dealing with problems such as:
- Dirt removal - the film is physically cleaned before scanning, but usually many spots remain, especially dirt that may be printed in to the old film element. Those remaining spots can be removed digitally.
- Scratch repair - vertical scratches or rub marks, or individual random marks can be filled in.
- Dye fade restoration - the commonest problem with all but the newest colour films, digital colour correction can restore true colours to faded images where a conventional film grade cannot.
- Unsteady images - due to shrinkage or perforation damage or simply poor duplication in the past - can be re-steadied.