Click to expand.Good questions. Here's some places to contact: It's fair to say that some projects are joint efforts. For example, I've worked on projects where Company A did the negative film scanning, Company B (me) did the color correction, and Company C did the dust busting/stabilization/grain management. So it's not always just one place that does everything.

Sometimes films have defects like stains, grains, noise, vertical line scratches, etc., which will be very tough to remove. In order to restore such clips and enhance the quality of the film restoration software, a free download can be used.

My experience with Prasad and Reliance has been that you give them a minute of material to check, then they give you back an estimate based on the total run time of the project and the available time. Clearly, a film that has 900 pieces of dirt in every frame will cost more money to fix than a fairly clean film that only has 10 pieces of dirt in every frame.

Even with automation assistance, good work takes time and judgement. Thanks again for the insight, Marc. I have a 500-film library, and I want to offer the clips as stock footage through Getty Images, but I'm trying to figure out cost effective ways to restore the footage. Do I send it out to a film restoration house and pay (potentially) a lot of money, or do I buy the necessary (and expensive) software tools and do it myself? There seems to be no inexpensive way to do this. The correct choice is the lesser of two evils. But which to choose?

I have been considering the Diamant Film Restoration suite, but it costs $20,000. And I'm not sure I can test drive it beforehand. Same cost for the Phoenix software. However, the one option you mentioned - MTI's DRS Nova software - allows me to download it for two weeks to evaluate it.

At least I can try before I buy. And it costs $12,500. Allows you to download their restoration tools for free and do your full restoration work on your film. But they put some kind of restraint on the final output.

To remove the restraint, you pay them something like.006 cents per frame of footage. (One second of 24fps film works out to 14.4 cents. That's $8.64 per minute.) So the options are: 1) Send my footage to a full-service vendor who will do all the restoration work and create a finished movie ready to upload. (Most expensive option.) 2) Buy a professional suite of film restoration software tools and do the restoration myself. (Less expensive but a big time investment) 3) Do the restoration with free downloadable tools and pay to remove the watermark from the final product (Least expensive but a big time investment) All of these vendors have interesting business models, but it's hard to figure out which one works best for me.

Regarding DaVinci Resolve, I know it's world class color grading software, but I'm not sure how great it is at stabilizing. Even though Fusion is now built in, I'm not sure it does a better job than Apple Motion or Adobe AfterEffects. I downloaded Fusion, and I simply couldn't figure it out even after watching a YouTube tutorial. Well, anyway, thanks for your advice.

I will contact the vendors you mentioned previously and see if I can get quotes. More info > Less info.

Click to expand.If it's 500 films, I would wait until they're sold to justify the commitment to labor and hardware. I think even a small, cheap feature is going to take a minimum of 2 weeks to scan, color-correct, dust-bust, stabilize, degrain, and render. Multiply that times 500.

That sounds like 1000 weeks to me (20 years). You could build 10 rooms and do it all in 2 years. Have 2 shifts going, night and day, and you might be able to do it in 1 year. But there's always the risk that some films might take 6 months to do, and other films might only take 1 week. Realistically, it took us 8 months to completely scan, color-correct, remaster, and dirt-fix all 200 half-hour episodes of That 70s Show, and that was only 100 hours of material.

But we had six people working on it at the same time in different rooms. So call that '50 Feature Films' in 8 months. If they were really old films and not something shot in the 1990s, it would be much, much harder due to shading problems, incomplete pictures, rips, tears, fading, miscellaneous damage, and all that other stuff.

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I just finished mastering a film last weekend (a 1990 feature shot on film) where it turned out we had no main & end credits. Luckily, we had a late-1990s DVD that had all the main and end credits, which we were able to meticulously match to and rebuild in 2K digital. I think the end results were actually better than the original, but at least we know the typeface, timing, and sizing all matched. But that alone added another 15 hours of work to the job. Normally, I don't do this but I opted to go above & beyond the call of duty, because I like the client and I don't mind going the extra mile. I know of AMIA members who do the same kind of thing with deteriorating silent films, where they recreate the old English intertitles, using scripts and incomplete elements as source material. So this kind of thing is necessary, but it certainly adds to the time and effort involved in remastering classic films.