Restoration of historic film for digital compression: a case study

With the advent of compressed video standards such as MPEG, film archives around the world are looking at using the medium as a new means of distributing historically significant film material. However, we find that a compression standard such as MPEG, which is optimised for the statistics of modern motion picture film and video, is poorly suited to coding motion pictures recorded with early technologies and suffering from severe age related degradation. Indeed restoration of some historically significant film is necessary, not just so that it may be returned to its former visual quality, but to prevent the film from looking significantly worse after compression. We describe the degradation artifacts encountered-in a historically significant film made in 1906, the strategies employed to improve its compressed quality and the results of these efforts