DIAMANT-Film Restoration Software is a high-end solution that offers automatic, semi-automatic, and interactive tools for film restoration, cleaning, and repair. Its unparalleled capabilities have earned it a strong reputation among film archives, post-houses, studios, and laboratories worldwide since 2001. Our solution addresses almost any type of film defect with ease. A constant state of evolution is ensuring that DIAMANT-Film remains at the forefront of the industry.
DustBuster+ is cutting edge software for interactive digital film cleaning and restoration. The fully automatic filters help you eliminate dust and dirt with very little effort. The efficient and easy to use tools allow quick fixing of any kind of single image defects using our click & fix technology.Restoration Project Filmoteca de Catalunya
Film Title: SEMAINE SAINTE EN ESPAGNE, LA. SÉVILLE: PROCESSION
Lumière Catalogue number: 858
Production Company: Cinematographe Lumière
Country: França
Year: 03/04/1898 - 08/04/1898
Location: calle Méndez Núñez (Sevilla)
Reason for restoration:
This film has been restored as part of the Miquel Porter Project which consists of manual scanning, digital restoring and film transferring of unique film materials on cellulose nitrate stock, and with physical characteristics of the days before standardization (perforations of non-standard form and size, or different systems of colouring), but, above all, these are very fragile and brittle materials, with problems of decomposition).
General description of damages:
The material was very brittle and slightly warped. The main physical damage was in the perforations and it affected part of the image. There was also a torn frame and there were multiple scratches of different length and width. Finally there was some dust and minor stains which could be removed either by physically hand cleaning the film with chemicals or digitally by DIAMANT-Film Restoration.
Effort of restoration and time it took to get the movie done:
The film was first thoroughly inspected and chemically cleaned by hand. A general report was done to start the restoration process (1 day).
The film was then scanned frame-by-frame in a photographic professional scanner at 5K (2 weeks) and then scaled down to 4K to restore the resulting .TIFF images by DIAMANT-Film Restoration. The digital restoration took 1 week approximately. The restored files were finally taken to a film lab transferred to a dupe negative and have a projection print made (1 week).
Short general description:
The digital restoration process was divided in a three-step approach:
- Stabilization:
Stabpointlocking module was used.The background buildings served as good lock points but as people were passing by in the foreground we had to use several cuts and generations to obtain good stabilization results. - Dust/Scratches:
We ran a DFlicker with very defensive settings prior to Linescratch & Dust modules. We used two different generations for dust with automatic settings, one for bright spots and the other for dark spots. We completed this step by running a generation of manual dust. - Interpolation/DustBuster:
As there were some frames with loss of information (especially in the sides of the frame, near the perforations) we used Interpolate Image or Interpolate sequence. In the end we ran DustBuster to finish the restoration project.
About Filmoteca de Catalunya:
It is a public institution devoted to recover, conserve, preserve, restore and catalogue the catalan film heritage. It also provides access to the film heritage and to promote the knowledge of film culture in general.
Images before/after:
