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Bored sitting at home? Try restoring an old show or movie




It happens that some series or television movie make a lasting impression on the child. And when a child grows up and again looks at the same material, he may be disappointed - especially if you watch video on a modern screen with high resolution. However, fans from all over the world are trying to use technology to bring the standards of the past to the present. Meet the upscalers.

One can recall many examples of professional projects that tried to both preserve and improve old films. CBS spent a ton of money on new computer effects to re-release Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation on Blu-ray. In Britain, BBC has been collaborating for decades with professional Doctor Who fans to clean up and restore classic episodes of the series.

However, there are many projects launched not by film studios, but by single fans who longed to pay tribute to their favorite works.

Any director knows that shooting a film cannot be finished, they can only be abandoned.
George Lucas, 2004

Of all the projects that restore old tapes, the most controversial was the work on Star Wars. Before starting work on prequels, George Lucas wanted to give the original films the look he wanted from the beginning. He spent $ 10 million on a rigorous restoration of films from the original negatives. And at the end of this process, Lucas decided to fix his movie so that the fans did not like it.

He added computer graphics to scenes, which he initially abandoned for reasons of lack of time and money. He filled empty backs with digital actors and creatures, and sometimes they as a result drew attention to themselves. He changed the essence of some characteristic moments, and the fans, to their horror, watched how the original scenes began to develop in a new way. Since then, Lucas has begun to demand the release of the "original" version of the films received from the cleaned film.

And in 2006, he did it. As additions to a special DVD edition dedicated to the 30th anniversary of the trilogy, fans received their films “in the original”. However, in order to dissuade fans of the attractiveness of the originals, Lucas did not use cleaned scans from the film. He transferred to DVD a rather poor copy of the film from LaserDisc media from 1993 with fixed letterboxing . In fact, Lucas gave the fans the originals, but in such a quality that even videotapes would be horrified.



A certain director once expressed his opinion about the correction of films after the release. In 1988, he wrote a congressional committee appeal condemning this kind of action. “People who modify or destroy works of art and our cultural heritage for profit are barbarians,” he wrote. He condemned "engineers with their computers", "spoiling" precious paintings by "adding or removing materials to the philosophical taste of the copyright holder." This, of course, was written by a director and producer named George Lucas.

Since then, several fans have tried to recreate the original Star Wars by editing existing material. Among them, Pyotr Harmachek, nicknamed “Harmi”, is a specialist in visual effects, the author of the “Specialized Edition” of paintings [The Despecialized Editions ]. He says that Lucas’s attempts to change the originals are “cultural vandalism”, which he decided to fight. To do this, he had to collect materials from DVD releases and pirated copies of film film. Sometimes, to create the perfect picture, I went through manual rotoscoping and scene animation .

In addition, there is a fan project 4K77authored by Silver Screen Crew, which creates the 4K version of the original 1977 film (without episode number and subtitle). One of its members, who wanted to remain anonymous, introduced himself as Rob, and said that he worked in the United States as a programmer, and had been involved in the project for several years. To date, 4K77 has been released, as well as 4K83 - the 4K version of 1983's Return of the Jedi. Work on the film "The Empire Strikes Back" is ongoing.



Rob's story began a few years ago when he was discussing with other fans how to save Star Wars at a forum. “Once,” he said, “someone wrote: why not just buy a film with a film and scan it yourself?” It is easy to say - the films are not freely sold, and usually they are returned to the studio for archiving or destruction after rental.

At that moment, it seemed impossible, however, one of the forum members came across unclaimed reels with the film “The Empire Strikes Back”. Unfortunately, no self-respecting film scanning company would agree to do such a project - it would be doubtful from a legal point of view, and the studios might not like it. Worse, the cost of scanning a movie was far beyond the reach of a handful of scattered fans.

Rob said their team found someone who was able to “assemble a film scanner from a VCR in his basement that moved the film in front of the lens of a digital camera.” From a practical point of view, such an apparatus was not suitable for scanning the entire film - it would "take years", however, it proved the operability of the concept. Fortunately, fashion trends and technology improvements greatly facilitated their task.

"" When cinemas switched to digital in 2014, they began to get rid of 35 mmprojectors, ”said Rob. The team eventually bought "five or six" projectors and began to develop schemes for turning them into a movie scanner. First, they connected an HD camera with a telescopic lens to the projector to take every shot. Then they used the BlackMagic 4K camera instead, connected to a device for dubbing movies from the 1980s.

After digitizing, they stretched the image to the correct aspect ratio and brought the colors in line with the existing (“clean”) versions of the films. Then, using a bunch of scripts and hacks for Photoshop, they superimposed frames from the Blu-ray version on the frames of the film. “I used a difference filter, which showed the difference between frames - in fact, isolating dirt and dust,” said Rob. The film used for 4Q77 was “clearly damaged, and defended by negatives for a couple of generations.”

However, such manual removal of graininess led to the fact that in six months only half of the first film was cleaned. Then Rob turned to Phoenix- a video recovery package that automates part of this process, albeit not too well suited for its tasks. Rob said the program works too hard, and in trying to remove grit and dust, it removes important details from the picture - for example, stars. However, after each pass with the Phoenix program, he manually checks each frame, restoring the lost details.



Rob says that in about an hour a day, he manages to edit about 1,000 frames. In total, the film has 180,000 frames. “The picture is constantly getting better,” said Rob, “and it’s almost as good as the official version.” However, he realizes that no matter what heights his team achieves, the original net negatives in the LucasFilm repository will still win in quality.

Work on two other films brought joy and sadness to the team - the 1983 film brought joy and the other sadness. “We were lucky with the Jedi,” said Rob, “we managed to find a clean copy, almost without dirt and damage.” The only thing worth fixing, according to the team, is the colors. They want to bring them as close as possible to how they would look on the official release.

As for the “empire,” the team contacted a private collector claiming to have a blank copy of the film on tape. In the future, this film will be scanned and given to the team for remastering and upscale.

For a fan project that uses an algorithmically enhanced scan from a four-year-old copy of a movie, 4K77 looks awesome. Fortunately, Fox, LucasFilm, and now Disney, decided not to pursue these free copies. “They were very tolerant of us and other people releasing fan editions of Star Wars,” said Rob. He added that the persecution was not worth the time because of the small community of fans obsessed with the original version of the films.

Since Star Wars was filmed and shown in movie theaters, copies of this film can, in principle, be obtained on film. It is these artifacts that allow fans to try to restore the original, returning to its former glory. TV shows are not so easy to find, and the material is usually limited to what is available on the home video market.

In 2018, I described the sad story of the Babylon 5 series, shot in anticipation of the future high-definition television. However, the neglect of the project by Warner Bros. and tight budget cuts made our copies look awful. High-quality originals are locked up in storage, and although fixing them would not be so expensive, the material there simply disappears.



However, this does not stop the fans - on their side the cheapening of technology and easy access to them. Once upon a time, professional restoration of films required equipment worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, but today it can be done quite well on a home computer. Today, even on a smartphone, you can edit video, not to mention laptops.

The development of AI provides improved aspale technology compared to previous ones, especially for ordinary enthusiasts. For example, there is an ESRGAN generative-competitive network that uses two competing neural networks to improve image resolution. It is popular in the video game community to improve the resolution of various aspects of old games.

More noteworthy will be the Gigapixel AI package from Topaz Labs, which increases the resolution of images from the original image to 4K. One of the famous examples of its use is the upscale of the 1896 film “Train Arrival” [ L'Arrivee d'un train en gare de La Ciotat ] to UHD. Since Gigapixel was intended to improve the quality of photographs, films have to be cut into frames. However, with good motivation, video editors are capable of such - and get amazing results.



Stefan, nicknamed "Captain Robau," started using Gigapixel, and then an even newer video tool from the same company to increase texture resolution for the Half-Life version called ReSrced . However, he quickly switched to the cult television series of his childhood, including Star Trek: Deep Space 9, Voyager, Babylon 5, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Earth: The Last Conflict.

“I am definitely passionate about this project,” said Robau. The project began with his experiments to increase the resolution for the game Final Fantasy VII. He quickly switched to old television series, notorious for their poor quality. “On HD monitors, you begin to notice the difference between standard-definition TVs of the 90s and modern films in HD,” he said.

Robau said that Gigapixel does not work as well as its manual upscale attempts, but much faster. “It does not come close in quality to a real remaster,” he said, but shows “what can be achieved even without access” to the original master recordings and professional equipment. And the series, which no one really cares about, have a chance that fans will be engaged in their improvement at home.

Other people also worked in this vein, and uploaded small demonstrations of their work on YouTube. And for most projects, these passages are likely to remain passages. Of course, as soon as someone starts uploading the entire series to the Internet, the right owners will immediately run to complain about him.

You can think about what motivates people to spend so much personal time on restoring such material. One of the often pop-up explanations is childhood impressions and the emotional connection that formed during growing up. Rob from the 4Q77 project said that he first saw Star Wars in a movie theater, barely learning how to walk, but the moment he realized what was happening only came to him in 1982, when he watched this movie on television. He said that this telecast showed him to “go and buy all the toys that my cousins ​​had praised me so long ago.”

Michael Moreau, who experimented with Gigapixel and the restoration of Babylon 5 last year“, Feels his connection with this series. “The series was released around the time when my father and I lived separately after his divorce,” he said. The two of them first watched the series on a poorly functioning TV, and then continued to monitor it as the TVs in the house improved. “And in difficult times, he became our link with my father,” he added.

Robau says that with “viewing Star Trek, Stargate and other things on CRT screens” are associated his best memories from adolescence. However, such material was often shot with a small budget and at a speed not suitable for HDTV. “Returning to viewing in adulthood, you begin to notice poor quality, ragged edges, etc.”. He added that his project is “an attempt to show me, an adult, all this in such good quality that I saw it as a young man.”

The problem of adulthood is that reality never appears before us in the same good resolution that our memories show us. Perhaps all these projects are connected with an attempt to pull real life to the high standard of our nostalgic memories.

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