Color Film of London From 1902 Now Fully Restored

Hi - the creator, Bard Canning here. That's actually a really great idea. I've emailed them about it. But, I'm not going to hold my breath. They don't appear to know much about post-production enhancement methods, etc. The "advanced" post-processing by the company shown involved nothing more than rendering the frames as a movie. They appeared to have done nothing at all to stabilize the individual RGB frames or to correct the histogram or color balance. I wouldn't want to attempt this by de-converting the video footage - it would just be too ugle and low-resolution. But here's hoping that they allow me access to the original frame scans.

Thanks for the great idea, guys!

That Curiosity descent video was amazing. Here's an even better side-by-side with "director's cut" captions explaining what's being done: http://youtu.be/pjeHZ9poew4

Thanks for sharing. But in answer to your question - the RGB channels are there - you can download the h264 vid and decompose (sure, you'll some quality, but that's not the real blocker). The real issue is the time - if you believe him, the Mars Curiosity guy says it took him a month to pull that off: "It took 29 days from start to finish, working full-time on it for the last week. This was the most laborious media project that I’ve ever done. But I don't regret a minute of it. ", so you'd have to convince him to do it..

But you can probably PM him on Reddit if you're serious enough ;)

http://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=bard_canning

I think much of the color bleeding is due to the colors being shot at different times. Prokudin-Gorskii images have color bleeding and most of the subjects photographed are static and still. Motion interpolation and color enhancement is a bit different than merging the RGB channels from different moments in time back together. It's similar to deinterlacing fields of video together to make a progressive frame. Results can vary and artifacts will probably still exist when there is a lot of motion.

I guess one could attempt to get a luma(greyscale) version of the film together using the different channels and then attempt to fill in color using approximations. Sounds like a lot of work.

"To license the use of images or clips, please contact Science and Society Picture Library."

That's unfortunate. If they released the raw digital data to the public, I bet someone out there would take it on themselves to restore it much further.

You could tempt him with the thought of putting "Full HD color film from London, 1902" on youtube and mean it.

Should be plenty of papers on the Prokudin-Gorskii images on how to overcome this.

One should also not discount the possibility of emulsion damage. There might just be some damage to the light-sensitive material or the original substrate.

The animation is incorrect: The color wheel has the colors "moving" up and the film moving down. When a red frame enters from the top, it should be projected as red for all three of its appearances on the screen.

If you watch the explanatory video, you see that successive frames were subject to different filters. A spinning color filter (blue, green, red) ran in front of the film, and within each set of three frames, you had successive shots filtered for blue, green, and red. In any scene in which there was motion of either the subject or the camera, you'll then see a slight mis-registration of each of the three component colors. It's an artifact of the process.

Modern film works by combining all three colors on a single spool of film and bringing out the color through the development process. An alternate method would be to shoot with three separate lenses onto three separate frames, though you'd then get parallax color artifacts (as with the Prokudin-Gorskii process, posted to HN recently).