Special Features
Restoration Comparison

Please note that in this demo the restored image on the right was GENERATED ENTIRELY FROM the raw scan on the left, which was the best material available.  Aproximately six weeks and over 240 hours of labor resulted in the version seen on the right in this demo.


This film was originally photographed on 16mm Ektachrome Commercial film. (Yeah, crazy, I know).The master material for this restoration was a release print made from an internegative created for the striking of prints for the educational market. I also have a Kodachrome print from the camera original, but it didn’t scan as well.  It did provide a better version of the soundtrack, however.  The scan of this release print is the best I had but still pretty pathetic.  Not pin registered, it was faded, fuzzy, dirty, scratched, and horrifically grainy. What’s worse, every single splice suffered from a malady where the second frame after the cut is distorted and out of register. A great deal of handwork would be necessary in re-registering and repairing each of those mis-registered frames.


Yet upon closer examination and experimentation, this horrific “master scan” seemed to have enough information in it to reconstruct the film to a watchable version. The restoration was done in phases. The first phase was general de-graining, and dust removal. When complete this was rendered out and became the new “master.”  The primary tool used for de-graining and dust removal was a plug-in called Neat Video. It does temporal sampling to do noise removal, much like many other similar tools. But it has a dust removal feature which apparently looks for single frame events and fills in the information from surrounding frames. It’s amazing. It will eliminate 80 to 90 percent of the dirt automatically, which in this case was thousands of dust bunnies. Scratches often had to be dealt with through hand retouching.



The second phase of the salvage mission was a more thorough color correction and shot by shot stabilization. Because of this film’s animation origins, with lots of locked off shots, stabilization was not terribly difficult, merely tedious. The fireside scenes turned out to be the most problematic for stabilization as the fire’s flicker confused the software-based tracker. What stabilization could be achieved in these scenes was generally done manually.  


But there was another issue that haunted us during the 1978 production. Because the original film was shot in the smaller format of 16mm registration seems to have been less than stellar, even in our Mitchell camera and Optical printer.  As a result, the foreground figures would sometimes jitter against their background. We didn’t know exactly why then and I still don’t know why now. Some scenes were perfectly solid, so it wasn’t something we were doing wrong.


During post production we managed to come up with tricks that would limit the jitter to the characters only, after we determined that it was less objectionable to see a living person wiggling a bit than to see a table jumping around. I suspect that the high contrast 7362 film stock we were using was perhaps variable in its inter-perforation pitch.  But whatever the cause, this distracting jiggle would be nice to minimize or eliminate. With the shots generally stabilized, the remaining character jitter seemed even more annoying. But modern digital techniques could possibly come to the rescue.  


The fact that this was a graphical film with the characters as silhouettes turned out to be our saving grace as a gateway to how to remove more of the unsteadiness. If a character image is pure black, it is relatively simple to pull out of the scene and stabilize on its own…assuming there is something stationary in the element that one can latch onto.  


Amazingly, applying a clean background using a transfer mode of Darken allowed me to perform two miracles in one pass: I could get rid of the halos resulting from sharpening functions and simultaneously achieve a tack sharp silhouette. The result is often so sharp it appears as if the scene was shot on 35mm film! Once I discovered this technique I ended up painstakingly going through the film shot by shot and generating an empty background for each scene. If the characters were moving around a lot (rare) I could derive an empty background in Photoshop by laying a still frame where they were in one position over a frame where they were in another position using a transfer mode of “Lighten”. Since the foregrounds are black silhouettes the characters would disappear wherever the other image had anything lighter than black. This would therefore result in an image with more BG information and less characters.


I then retouched the rest of the background manually.  It was tedious but worth it. All in all the restoration was a worthwhile exercise. It was good to see an essentially dead artwork brought back to life . Here's hoping folks enjoy it as the labor of love that it is.