This blog has been silent for two years, but progress on this restoration project has been on-going, albeit with some significant pauses due to other demands on my time.
As of April 2017 we had reached a satisfying conclusion to the problem of stabilising the jitter in “Marianne”, the 1963 Tarax Show Christmas Pantomime which is the subject of my current focus.
For practical purposes the jitter was eliminated, but the problem of dust and scratches remained.
Earlier posts examined possible solutions for this:
-
“Exploring the Possibilities of Digital Restoration (in the USA)” (27 Nov 2014)
-
“Experiments in Digital Restoration with PFClean” (09 Sep 2015)
-
“More Digital Restoration Tests with Promoscape in Melbourne” (14 Oct 2016)
These solutions, both local and overseas, promised to cost more than could be justified for this project — a few thousand dollars would be the minimum and some of the options would cost a lot more and/or require an investment of time which I could not reasonably give to the project.
I did investigate one more digital restoration software package, from Digital Vision in the UK. This will be the subject of the next post.
Then I was introduced to Malcolm Richards at CameraQuip in Melbourne, who can both scan film and run the scans through batch dust reduction software which is less expensive and offers an acceptable compromise between quality and cost.
My visits to CameraQuip and what I learned there will follow in subsequent posts.
Finally we will look at the process of restoring the soundtrack, a task I am currently undertaking.
Stay tuned for more posts soon!