If anyone has read the article on Warner Brothers remastering process, I was browsing a website and came across a messageboard on the article where Bruce Perens posted (He did the Snow White Restoration). And he posted a bit on the process Disney used on the film.
"I worked on the Snow White restoration with Kodak Cinesite while at Pixar. The film was made with nitrate stock, as were all films back then - there wasn't another good method to make clear plastic stock. Nitrate is great organic fertilizer - as well as being chemically quite close to nitroglycerine and a tremendous fire hazard if the projector jams and the hot lamp burns the film.
The negative was preserved in a climate-controlled vault for 60 years. When it was finally opened, they found that fungus had grown on the negative.
The negative was chemically cleaned. Then, it was digitized in a wet-gate telecine. This is an impressive bit of optical technology: the film is immersed in a fluid with the same refractive index as the film itself. The fluid fills pits and scratches in the film, and they disappear.
The resulting digital movie went through an algorithmic "dust-buster" process, and then the reels with the worst damage were retouched by hand frame-by-frame. An operator got about 90 seconds to retouch a frame. There are 24 frames per second of film. This stretched the computer technology at the time, MIPS-based Sun or SGI workstations with clock speeds of a few hundred MHz, as it was difficult to simply read and write the film frame in sufficient time. It would be easier today on a fast PC.
Bruce "
Remastering
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Disneybell
