Digital restorations Discussions

[Vlad]

I was wondering, how were movies restored before Snow White’s 1993 theatrical re-release? I remember reading that Snow White was the first movie to be restored entirely on a computer, followed by Sleeping Beauty. I also found this video talking about Fantasia’s restoration in the early ‘90s.

https://youtu.be/DghHXndwcfQ?si=HolUTwFUs4xu3mcF

There is a part in which they actually use a knife to clean the frames. How exactly was it done before they started using computers?

[Christopher777]

Basically, before they started using computers, film restoration was super tedious. Imagine they had to clean each frame of the film by hand! They used special knives to remove dirt and scratches from the film strip. They would carefully scrape off the impurities with the knife, being careful not to damage the image. Then they would wash the entire film strip with chemicals to remove the remaining dirt. It was really time-consuming and required a lot of precision.

As for Snow White, yes, it was the first film to be fully restored on a computer at Disney! The whole team had to manually scan the frames into the computer and remove all the imperfections there. Later, Sleeping Beauty also went through this process.

That video you found shows how it was done really well. It's cool to see how they did it back in the day, right? Those knives were just part of the process; the rest was washing and repairing the frames by hand before computers came along and changed everything.

Best regards Christopher

[Vlad]

Hey Christopher, thanks for your response. I imagine it must have taken so much time to restore a movie back then. Using a computer makes things so much easier in this case. It helps, especially with the color corrections.