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"FRAME" Digital Film The new beauty of old films

The new beauty of old films
The FRAME digital film restoration system allows quick and cost- efficient restoration of damaged
cinema and video films also capable of correcting shooting errors thus eliminating the high costs
of reshooting. FRAME is the only existing system of this type.

The Problem

There appears to be no end in sight to the sky-rocketing development in the communications and TV
market.
The business potential yields an increased demand for old film material and makes archive material
commercially very attractive.
According to estimates by the UNESCO there are about 2,2 billion meters of nitro based film material
stored world-wide in archives.

Chemical changes due to the film material's age as well as improper handling before archiving have
caused the irretrievable damage of almost 90 percent of the silent movies and half of the films
produced before the year 1950.

The solution

The conventional personnel intensive manual digital restoration method results in unacceptably high costs.
The semi-automatic digital film restoration software LIMELIGHT developed by JOANNEUM RESEARCH
has succeeded in reducing the efforts considerably, however, the process is still too slow for industrial
use.
The processing time on a single workstation was 10 minutes per frame - much too long.

Due to these reasons FRAME, a parallelised digital film restoration system with processing speed
qualified for industrial use, was developed.

FRAME can perform the following restoration tasks:

Dust and Dirt Removal
Noise Suppression
Image Stabilisation
Scratch Removal
Flickering Correction
Dynamic Density-Correction
Frame Interpolation
Colour Conversion

The industrial factor

The main criterion for the product's commercial acceptance
in industrial use is the speed of the restoration process.
In this context there was a demand for FRAME to achieve
a frame processing rate within maximal 72 seconds (15
seconds for video resolution).

This high standard could only be achieved by applying HPCN -technologies, which made it possible
to beat the demanded time limit with the result of cutting the restoration costs to a minimum
of 400 US$ per minute of film.
The costs of digital film restoration are similar to those of analogue technologies but with the
advantage that the capacities of FRAME far exceed the range of possibilities of analogue film
restoration.

The project

The FRAME Software is based on a film restoration software named LIMELIGHT developed by
JOANNEUM RESEARCH within the EUREKA program. The ESPRIT project no 24220 FRAME was
initiated in July 97 by the following four partners:

1- VCPC, European Cetre for Parallel Computing at Vienna

2- QSW, Quadrics Supercomputers World, Roma

3- LNF, Laboratoire Neyrac Films, Paris

4- JR, JOANNEUM RESEARCH, Graz

The main goals of the FRAME project:

Parallelisation of the LIMELIGHT film restoration software for distributed systems by using the
portable Message Passing Interface (MPI).
Pilot installation and evaluation of the restoration software together with the French

Examples of restored films

FRAME has been developed and tested by the restoration of numerous films, like:

Fantomas, le mort qui tue, 1913
Violettes Imperiales, 1954
Opernball, 1956
The Voyage to the moon (La voyage dans la lune) , 1908
Holzflِsser auf der Mur, 1938
La Grande Illusion 1937
Panorama von Graz 1915
Pirsch unter Wasser, 1939,

The demand

The FRAME restoration software has already been installed for several customers, such as:

LNF, Laboratoire Neyrac Films, Paris
JR , JOANNEUM RESEARCH, Graz
fx.Center Babelsberg, Potsdam

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