Film Restoration Methods at Test: Scratches Cleaning - Text 4
Digital methods
Digital technology achieves the same in a completely different way, with the extra benefit of identifying and erasing scratches, dust, and dirt ‘printed in’ from previous film generations. With this powerful advantage over its predecessor, computer software forcefully entered the field of film preservation by enabling the photographic process to be replicated or bypassed.
The film scanner takes a digital picture of each frame at the required pixel rate (or ‘definition’); through algorithms or manual interventions, the missing or altered portions are filled until the image is reconstructed. [The reconstruction, completed in 2018, of the vaudeville version of the classic animated film Gertie the Dinosaur (Winsor McCay, 1914) relied extensively on such interventions.]
