This is a sample of what a digitized black and white film with some dust and scratch minimum clean up processing can look like at 4K . This film had a mono optical soundtrack.
Contrast correction was also processed as well as subtitle creation to assist hearing impaired.
The film was a circa 1951 Bermuda Holiday depicting how wonderful it would be to visit Bermuda. It has scenes from various activities which were offered to tourists of the day.
This film was digitized at 24 frames per second at a resolution of 4096 × 2160 (DCI 4K). The color space was Sony Log3 with an average exposure at 2.0 or below and then color space corrected to R709.
Noise removal of film grain was also processed at a minimum level so as not to remove any detail from the clarity of ocean wave reflections. A minimal process to attenuate dust and scratches was also applied but not fully as we wanted to keep some damage to allow the essence of age.
A slight sharpening was then applied just to restore any lost clarity through the picture improvement processes.
The film was then mastered to Grass Valley Canopus CODEC as this CODEC is an amazing technology that offers great clarity at any resolution and also allows the master to be edited over 30 times without loss.
Once the master was created, we then encoded the master file to MP4 H264 though H265 and H266 were also options. During the MP4 encoding we auto cropped the sides black to eliminate any non original imagery from the MP4.
It was then posted to Youtube and embedded into this page.
Youtube will indeed more than likely re-encode the file and will display the file with less quality than the master file possesses. The file was mastered in the frame size resolution aspect ratio of 16:9.
Enjoy this 4K restoration of a 1951 retro film. If you have any needs to have films restored to high quality please feel free to contact us.