Digital Remastering for cine film continued

New Scene Overexposure Removal Process (EXR)

Often with older cine cameras and some with a low light shot setting (XL) the camera would not perform so well in bright daylight. On beginning a shot the scene would very often be overexposed for a fraction of a second. As cine film was relatively expensive people tended not to film for very long, so consequently even a 50 ft reel may have 20 or more scenes on it. At the beginning of these scenes you would see the flash of overexposure until the camera adjusted to the correct light setting. With lots of scenes this means lots of bright flashes all the way through, which may have been acceptable in the 1960s’ but can be a little tiring in the 21st century. So what does Timeless Moments offer?

As standard we remove each and every section of overexposed film from your reels. This is not an automatic process, it is done manually with painstaking precision. We make a cut at the start of the flash and another at the end of the flash (usually about 2-4 frames but sometimes up to to 12 frames). The “damaged” section is then discarded. If the section affected must be kept then we use a key frame colour correction to manually adjust all the brightness levels from the start of the scene to the end of the affected portion, this is highly labour intensive but is included as part of the Digital Remastering process for all cine transfer.

Don’t worry. you are not losing anything in this process because the film we have cut is not viewable anyway. The whole process is of course done in the computer, your original films are untouched.

Click on the picture to see a short film explaining how this process works.

Digital Video Image Stabilisation (DVIS)

Another recent introduction to our digital remastering service is DVIS. Quite often cine film can be completely ruined by jitter (high frequency vibration or shake) and good old fashioned camera shake. The latter is caused by movements of the hand and arms whilst shooting whilst the former has several possible causes such as a worn camera, worn or loose film cartridge, damaged sprockets in the camera, damage to the sprocket holes on the film and so on. DVIS will completely remove 99% of  jitter and shake at the expense of zooming in to the image slightly, typically you would lose about 6% of the picture depending on the severity of the problem. DVIS is extremely labour and computer processor intensive and as such is not currently offered as an inclusive part of digital remastering. It can be ordered as an extra for 2p per foot of cine film. If whilst capturing your footage we think your project would benefit from DVIS we will advise you accordingly.

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