8mm Forum: Restoring colour faded films via telecine

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Posted by Pete Richards (Member # 2203) on June 12, 2013, 10:30 PM:

I just thought I'd ask people if they had tried doing a telecine of faded films to get some of the colour back?
I had recently been trying to restore an old eastman print of Disney's Song of the South that was very red.
I can vary the Red/Green/Blue lighting mix and also the individual gamma of each channel when capturing and had been getting some promising results.
This is what the film projected looked like:

and this is how it looked with adjusting the lighting colour and gamma:

A lot more colour correction will be required after scanning, but I am pretty happy with getting that result from the telecine, makes the rest of the colour correction work easier to do after that point. Has anyone else had success extracting colour from faded prints? I'd love to know what techniques people are using.

Posted by Winbert Hutahaean (Member # 58) on June 13, 2013, 05:42 PM:

Pete I am bit confused with your two samples above.

Is the first one (with very red tint) originally like that or it was colorful before then you turned it to red tint?

I never knew that playing with gRed/Green/Blue lighting mix and also the individual gamma will give the result like the second picture. I always found that we can reach a satisfying one color tone but changing the other color tone. So it has never been balance like your second picture.

Can explain it please?

Posted by Pete Richards (Member # 2203) on June 13, 2013, 06:27 PM:

The red image is exactly how it looks when projected on the wall. The print has faded very far towards Red.

I built a telecine rig with an RGB LED light source that gives control over how strong each each colour is, and this can be changed in real time. This allowed me to get a fairly good improvement straight away. Then by adjusting the gamma on the camera, mainly pushing the Green and Blue gamma up a long way, it resulted in the colour balance getting much closer to the original.

Adding colour correction on the computer should allow an even better result. I am pleased with the experiment so far, a lot of films I thought had faded past saving can still be transferred with reasonable success, so at least I can still enjoy them on DVD or the computer.

Posted by Winbert Hutahaean (Member # 58) on June 13, 2013, 06:38 PM:

OK Pete,

Below is exactly two same prints, but once has faded or warming. Can you work with the warming one to get close with the LPP print on the left ?

Posted by Pete Richards (Member # 2203) on June 13, 2013, 08:11 PM:

Oh yes, quite easily. That print is less faded than the ones I have been working with.
If I had that print to scan it would be easy to bring out the colour.
But even without having the print to scan, a quick adjustment will get close to that. I would normally spend much more time than the minute I spent on this, but it gives some idea.

Posted by Adrian Winchester (Member # 248) on June 13, 2013, 10:51 PM:

That's a fantastic transformation you have achieved in relation to the 16mm - you could go into business offering your services professionally!

I know someone who got a lab to correct and reprint a reel of faded 16mm (at enormous expense) and he considered the result excellent, but I have no idea of how it's done in a non-digital way.

Posted by Pete Richards (Member # 2203) on June 13, 2013, 11:37 PM:

These days it is just a matter of scanning and correcting it digitally and then using a film recorder to put it back out to film.

I used to be a colorist before I became a 3D animator, before I became a single dad and high pressure, long hour (and well paid) work became impossible [Smile]

So I still know a few tricks.
I am interested in saving films that are heading over to the red side of the force, at the very least to get them digitised and corrected so that they can be watched digitally and put back out to film if the yearning was there to do so.

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