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Classic Cartoons Marred by Digital Restoration 296

Posted by CmdrTaco from the technology-works-for-good-and-evil dept.
Carl Bialik from the WSJ writes "When classic animated films undergo digital restoration, key features can get lost in translation. The Wall Street Journal reports that the process meant to smooth over scratches and dirt specks on old film "can also remove some of the lines that make up the animation -- for example, blurring Tom's face in a Tom and Jerry cartoon, or erasing lines in Woody Woodpecker's fast-moving beak." "
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Classic Cartoons Marred by Digital Restoration More

Classic Cartoons Marred by Digital Restoration

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  • and now... (Score:5, Informative)

    by professorhojo ( 686761 ) * on Tuesday May 24, 2005 @10:21AM (#12623113)

    here's a non-registration-required [awn.com] before-and-after example.

  • regardless (Score:4, Funny)

    by Neuropol ( 665537 ) on Tuesday May 24, 2005 @10:22AM (#12623127) Homepage
    you're still going to be turned on by Buggs Bunny dressed in drag.

  • So in other words... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    They're doing a half-assed job of the restoration. Not that I care about these particular cartoons, but some people do.

    Restoration... apparently that word does not mean what I think it means.

    - MreX

  • Not just cartoons (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 24, 2005 @10:24AM (#12623146)
    But the process can also remove some of the lines that make up the animation -- for example, erasing lines in Woody Woodpecker's fast-moving beak.

    This problem isn't limited to cartoons - I hear that they're running into to similar problems during the restoration of early Ron Jeremy videos.

  • Or... (Score:5, Funny)

    by D-Cypell ( 446534 ) on Tuesday May 24, 2005 @10:25AM (#12623152)
    "for example, blurring Tom's face in a Tom and Jerry cartoon, or erasing lines in Woody Woodpecker's fast-moving beak."

    Or making one character seem to fire their blaster first when you were sure that the other fired first last time your watched it.

    • Re:Or... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by svallarian ( 43156 )
      Or, completely removing scenes from cartoons.

      (Ever seen the bugs bunny cartoon where the fish jumps out of the water, pulls a gun on himself and kills himself?)

      • Censoring cartoons (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 24, 2005 @10:57AM (#12623465)
        They removed the "mammy" voice from the black maid in at least one Tom & Jerry and replaced it with a generic white woman's. Only her legs (black) are shown when she is talking to them. Granted it is mildly racist by today's standards but I'd rather see the original and understand the norms of the time than to be treated like a mindless child who needs to be shielded.
        • They aren't shielding you, they are shielding themselves from idiotic (yet costly) lawsuits.

          • Re:Censoring cartoons (Score:5, Insightful)

            by Dun Malg ( 230075 ) on Tuesday May 24, 2005 @01:16PM (#12624968) Homepage
            They aren't shielding you, they are shielding themselves from idiotic (yet costly) lawsuits.

            Actually, they're shielding themselves from idiotic public outry. A vocal minority getting their dander up and organizing a stupid boycott is more dangerous than a lawsuit. A lawsuit needs to have a claim of damages, and any suit wherein damages are claimed as a result of simply viewing a cartoon will likely be summarily dismissed at little cost. A baseless rumor that a TV station is "racist" because they showed a historically accurate cartoon is the bigger threat. You can't get a judge to order public sentiment to turn and go the other way.

        • They removed the "mammy" voice from the black maid in at least one Tom & Jerry and replaced it with a generic white woman's. Only her legs (black) are shown when she is talking to them. Granted it is mildly racist by today's standards but I'd rather see the original and understand the norms of the time than to be treated like a mindless child who needs to be shielded.

          Indeed. It's not so ridiculously over-the-top racist like "Coal Black and the Sebben Dwarves". Now there's a cartoon we'll never see on

        • Re:Censoring cartoons (Score:3, Insightful)

          by Dr. Evil ( 3501 )

          Oddly, the mammy character is probably the most sane character in those cartoons. I'm not sure why they voiced her over. Children might wonder why a cat and a mouse would be living in a household with a black lady?

          But then again, when I was little, I didn't think that Bert and Ernie had to explain their living arrangement.

      • I've never seen that particular one. It must not have been considered particularly politically correct even back in the '70's. Admittitedly I was in Okinawa for a good portion of that particular decade. It does sound like the kind of gag Tex Avery and Pals would go for, though. Probably pretty funny in context, too.

        Interestingly enough, Cartoon Network Europe appears to have completely different content from Cartoon Network USA and you can still see a lot of those classic cartoons on that network in their

      • (Ever seen the bugs bunny cartoon where the fish jumps out of the water, pulls a gun on himself and kills himself?)

        IIRC, the line was "Now I've seen everything", in a Peter Lorre [imdb.com] voice.

    • Re:Or... (Score:3, Informative)

      by shreevatsa ( 845645 )
      You haven't actually said it, but I've heard many people say "Han shot first". That makes no sense, "Greedo shot first" does.
      I mean, when you say "Greedo shot first", you can then go on and say "...And then Han shot back and killed him/it". But you just can't say "Han shot first"... and what, Greedo shot next?
      So my advice to you, my dear friends, is to quit saying "Han shot first". You should instead be saying "Only Han shot" or "Greedo never shot", or pointing people to the Top 10 Other Things that Han [fecundity.com]

  • Poor quality control (Score:5, Insightful)

    by dave-tx ( 684169 ) * <{moc.liamg} {ta} {todhsals+80891fd}> on Tuesday May 24, 2005 @10:25AM (#12623157)
    FTFA:

    Walt Disney Co. has largely avoided criticism of its cartoon restorations. For most of its projects, Disney doesn't use digital noise reduction, relying instead on artists to inspect each frame of film and remove defects either manually or with proprietary software. "If you just take a film and throw it through a noise-reduction system, you're never going to get the same standard of quality," says Jeff Miller, president for world-wide post-production and operations.

    Although I'm not surprised, I'm disappointed that this isn't part of the standard process. To me, just running the film through DNR is lazy and indicative of a company just trying to make a quick buck. If you want to use a DNR machine, you gotta get a real person to check the work. Period.

    Clearly, those responsible have no excuse for it. Again, FTFA:

    Craig Hoffman, a spokesman for Time Warner Inc.'s Warner Bros., which released the Looney Tunes DVDs last fall, declines to comment on the complaints about the restored cartoons. "There's a wide audience: children, collectors, people who grew up loving them," he adds.

    What exactly does a wide audience, or people who grew up loving [Looney Tunes] have to do with your quality control? Is passing a shoddy product off to some members of that wide audience acceptable? I can understand that young kids may not know the difference, but if you're targeting a wide audience, you gotta account for more than young kids.

    • I was thinking along similar lines, but I have to wonder how much of this restoration effort is basically rushed to the market just to have a revenue stream, to wit:

      But as DVDs become more popular, studios have done the math and found that classic cartoons are relatively cheap to restore and sell well. "DVD is the medium for collectors. They gobble this stuff up," says Robert Mayo,

      And glitches can be largely avoided if digital noise reduction is done by a skilled technician. "Sometimes it's being used w

    • Although I'm not surprised, I'm disappointed that this isn't part of the standard process. To me, just running the film through DNR is lazy and indicative of a company just trying to make a quick buck. If you want to use a DNR machine, you gotta get a real person to check the work. Period.

      I agree, but Disney's talking about manually correcting every single frame and for a 2 hour film you're talking more than 175,000 individual images. That is a huge number of man-hours, and frankly, there's really no nee

  • blaming the tools (Score:5, Interesting)

    by lazuli42 ( 219080 ) on Tuesday May 24, 2005 @10:25AM (#12623158) Homepage Journal
    Why are they complaining about the tools when it's apparent that it's the workmanship that's at fault?

    For an excellent counter example, check out the beautiful work that Animeigo did restoring the original Macross [animeigo.com] series when they released it on DVD a few years ago. The cleaned up print makes the series look like it was ten years newer.

    • Re:blaming the tools (Score:5, Informative)

      by AKAImBatman ( 238306 ) * <akaimbatman AT gmail DOT com> on Tuesday May 24, 2005 @10:33AM (#12623254) Homepage Journal
      In this case, it is the tool. Or more precisely, misusing the tool. The DVNS tech is designed for live action movies and thus does a poor job on drawn cartoons. The "correct" method for restoring cartoon film is to take apart each cell and restore the cell individually. This process is similar to colorizing a black and white movie, and produces results that can look better than the original film!

      According to the article given by the first poster, they even have digital tools to speed up this process as well. Thus the only real excuse is "we don't want to spend the time or money". *shrug*

    • Re:blaming the tools (Score:2, Informative)

      by ThosLives ( 686517 )
      While quality control processes are partly to blame, there is an inherent limitation in digitising analog works. Think about it this way: what's the resolution of a chemical film frame? It's surely higher than most digitial representations. Also, the amount of "storage" required for a single frame of analog is kind of meaningless. You have to go things like information theory to determine the information content in analog work. Another interesting thing to note is that the shape of a pixel in chemical film

  • Log (Score:5, Funny)

    by TeknoHog ( 164938 ) on Tuesday May 24, 2005 @10:27AM (#12623178) Homepage Journal
    Mr. Mackenzie, who grew up on the Ren & Stimpy cartoons of the 1990s. He keeps a log

    Of course.

    • What rolls down stairs Alone or in pairs... Rolls over your neighbor's dog? What's great for a snack And fits on your back? It's Log! Log! Log! It's Lo-og, it's Lo-og It's big, it's heavy It's wood! It's Lo-og, Lo-og It's better than bad It's good!!!

      • Re:Log (Score:5, Informative)

        by XxtraLarGe ( 551297 ) on Tuesday May 24, 2005 @10:33AM (#12623244) Journal
        Sorry, that is hard to read. Here's a formatted version of the Log song:

        What rolls down stairs
        Alone or in pairs...
        Rolls over your neighbor's dog?
        What's great for a snack
        And fits on your back?
        It's Log! Log! Log!
        It's Lo-og, it's Lo-og
        It's big, it's heavy
        It's wood!
        It's Lo-og, Lo-og
        It's better than bad
        It's good!!!

      • i don't think any other cartoon can bring me back to a specific point in my life as much as ren & stimpy. I watched it and nothing else for about a week. Every episode, one after another after another, over and over.

        then i stopped, and haven't watched any since.

        Remember the crocodile mating call?
        Remember toast-man?
        Remember stimpy as rapunzel who let down her hair, so that ren could climb up and rescue her? And when he gets to the top, its a nose hair? :) The crazy monks who chased after Ren in the
        • i don't think any other cartoon can bring me back to a specific point in my life as much as ren & stimpy. I watched it and nothing else for about a week. Every episode, one after another after another, over and over.

          So what you mean to say is that now you have a life?

          • So what you mean to say is that now you have a life?

            Yes. in 1991 when i was 16, i can definitively say that i had no life. what else ya got?
    • One of his favorite songs must be Happy Happy Joy Joy
    • Everyone loves a log.
  • Am I the only one who starts to get paranoid about the changing of history?
    Star Wars IV-VI, Disney cartoons, now these.
    Where does it end?

    Where did I leave my tinfoil hat?
    • TFA was not talking about changing history, it was about errors in the digital clean-up process. How does removing scratches and dust equate to changing history?

    • Re:1984 and chaning history? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by STrinity ( 723872 ) on Tuesday May 24, 2005 @02:10PM (#12625597) Homepage
      You act like this is a new phenomenon. It's not. There are works of Medieval literature where the bad guys were changed from Vikings to Saracens, because Viking raiders are, like, soooooo Eleventh Century, and some Middle Age Akiva Goldsman decided to, like, totally cash in on the whole Crusade fad.

  • I'm not sure if this is practical, but how hard is it to actually manually add the missing information after the restoration is done ? Just put back the "Missing Vine" and your done :-D

    • Re:Manual retouching ? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by cjh79 ( 754103 )
      It's not practical. First of all, it would be easier and more effective to just remove the unwanted artifacts manually in the first place. Secondly, if you are going to go around re-drawing things in the cartoon, well then, gee, you might as well just re-draw the whole cartoon... I'm sure the original artists would not be pleased with that. It would be like someone trying to restore The Last Supper by repainting over the problem areas.

      This problem is analogous to digital sound restoration. You can use
      • It would be like someone trying to restore The Last Supper by repainting over the problem areas.


        If Michelangelo had provided key frames to his Korean tweeners I'm sure it wouldn't be quite to blasphemous to paint over the problem areas.

  • Don't rush it! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by stuffduff ( 681819 ) on Tuesday May 24, 2005 @10:30AM (#12623214) Journal
    Sure we can digitally process it, but in the next decade the digital reprocessing will evolve, probably along the lines of the neural network, so that it can make better distinctions between fine lines and scratches. If they have to make some money on the technology, let them enhance products like Media Cleaner and improve digital video for a while. Remember Ted Turner's colorized classics? It was a big thing that never really went anywhere, because in the end it just didn't look right. Don't rush it, not with the classics. Human beings spent hours on every frame of those films. It was a labor of love. Digitally detracting from that level of commitment just because they can is a poor excuse abusing and disrespecting the art.
  • What I notice the most when I view classic cartoons with my kids is the compression artifacts. The old cartoons often had smooth curved lines and solid color fills, which don't fare very well when compressed by lossy algorithms that were designed primary for photographic data and operate on square cells of pixels. Not to mention the stingy bit-rates of digital TV providers.

    • So are you watching them on satellite or digital cable? Both kinds of providers will over-compress a lot of channels, not just cartoon channels, in order to get more channels into the same bandwidth, since most people don't notice the difference anyhow. They also run their video through real-time compression boxes, which inherently produces more artifacts than off-line compression.

      About five years ago, I pointed out the compression artifacts (the whole picture showed a grid of contrast between the macrob

    • What I notice the most when I view classic cartoons with my kids is the compression artifacts. The old cartoons often had smooth curved lines and solid color fills, which don't fare very well when compressed by lossy algorithms that were designed primary for photographic data and operate on square cells of pixels. Not to mention the stingy bit-rates of digital TV providers.

      Well. You can still find them on 16mm probably. Then you could restore them yourself. It'd be fun! Or not: project that old stuff the

  • I'm more concerned about censorship (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Junior J. Junior III ( 192702 ) on Tuesday May 24, 2005 @10:33AM (#12623247) Homepage
    A number of the old cartoons are kept in a closet of dirty secrets because they had racist themes in them. They're no longer being broadcast, which I suppose is fine as no one should have to put up with watching them, but the flipside of this is that they're being flushed down the memory hole, enabling us to sanitize our memory and pretend that we've always been a right and just society. I'd much rather lose a line or two in a digital restoration than to have these hideous examples lost to history.

    • Re:I'm more concerned about censorship (Score:4, Funny)

      by WormholeFiend ( 674934 ) on Tuesday May 24, 2005 @10:42AM (#12623343)
      I agree.

      On a related note, we should start a petition to keep the topless woman frame in The Rescuers [snopes.com].
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • "Oh, Rochester.." (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Meoward ( 665631 ) on Tuesday May 24, 2005 @10:52AM (#12623418)

      Good point. One WB cartoon I haven't seen in decades is arguably the funniest. Can't find it anywhere:

      In one (very recursive) scene, we find ourselves inside a movie theater, with a carefully illustrated scene of Bogart and Bacall playing on the screen. The "movie", of course, is the weird take of Jones, Freleng, et al. on live action: for example, Bogie casually tosses a flame-thrower to Bacall, instead of a Zippo, when she asks for a light.

      At one point, something explodes in Bogie's face (hey, WB cartoon, gotta have at least one explosion). With his soot-covered face, "Bogie" suddenly does an impersonation of Rochester, Jack Benny's long-suffering man-servant.

      Now, we can argue back and forth about the racism involved, but the sad fact is that it was a very funny short that fell well within even the most progressive norms of its day. (I honestly don't think any kids today would even get the Rochester joke -- if yours can, dear reader, you have some darn erudite children, I must say.)

      Now, if this cartoon was produced today, it would be deemed offensive, and rightfully so. But shouldn't we be allowed to see these older shorts.. while not removing them from the context of their times?

      • Re:"Oh, Rochester.." (Score:3, Informative)

        by 3waygeek ( 58990 )
        Said cartoon is named "Bacall to Arms"; it's on the DVD of "To Have and Have Not". Saw it just a couple of weeks ago.
      • Last night TCM ran the WB cartoon "Hollywood Steps Out," one of those pastiches filled with caricatures of what seems like every famous actor and Warner Bros contract player of the era. (Of course, I only recognise a fraction of them.) But the point is that the "That's All Folks" frame had small print at the bottom with a copyright date for the "edited version." So yes, something was taken out, probably some very funny (or not-so-funny) blackface gag. I have no idea what's missing, but even if the gag w

    • Re:I'm more concerned about censorship (Score:5, Insightful)

      by fermion ( 181285 ) on Tuesday May 24, 2005 @10:55AM (#12623445) Homepage Journal
      I would tend to agree. Many kids don't quite realize what prejudice was, and can't realy identify current disrespect because it is so toned down. Many have been lead to believe that prejudice does not currently exist in any meaningful way, and the past episodes have been overblown.

      Examples are becoming sanitized. Certainly the Tom & Jerry with Tom in blackface should be shown as an example of not so far off cultural norms. I think that the whole heckle and jeckly thing was somewhat disturbing. Certainly there are many shows that are proof of the cultural norms that many now wish to deny. Like in Family Guy European Road Trip, when the German tourguide censored the entirety of WWII out of his talk, claiming Germany was 'invited'.

    • You're right to be concerned, but it's unlikely that these cartoons are ever going to be flushed from our memories--there's a huge group of people out there who collect these racist/sexist/ultraviolent cartoons that are unlikely to be shown on Saturday mornings anymore. Do a search on eMule for "banned cartoons" and you'll see what I'm talking about. A lot of them are war-themed, dirty, or make cigarettes look really really cool. Occasionally, some companies will license these cartoons and sell them in co
  • At least I hope they do have the backup *before* they started the digital recovery process. We all knew something was lost when you just loaded stuff digitally - it's called quantisation.

    Anyway, I just think the clarity of the cartoon never mattered. There's this theory that says that the closer the look gets to humans the lesser the real human-ness we feel. Which could explain why most of the cartoons involve talking animals :)

    But I don't think Picasson should've used finer brushes either...

  • Same Thing Happens In Audio Too (Score:3, Interesting)

    by devphaeton ( 695736 ) on Tuesday May 24, 2005 @10:33AM (#12623252)
    Different process, but similar concepts. Lots of old music recordings get "destroyed" by digital remastering.

    In a case like this (with both the cartoons and the music), i would personally put up with hiss, scratches, dirt and pops until they've got the remastering tools perfected.

    My $0.02 + 5.5% tax

  • Is this even necessary? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by kickabear ( 173514 ) on Tuesday May 24, 2005 @10:34AM (#12623260) Homepage
    We all watched the cartoons, with their dirt and specks and the occasional hair. I never felt there was anything wrong with that stuff. It was just part of the animation and broadcast processes. It doesn't detract from the cartoons. Going back and "fixing" these minor defects would be like filling in the cracks in the paint on the Mona Lisa. It was art before it was perfect. Now, I'm not so sure.

    • Re:Is this even necessary? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by sharkb8 ( 723587 ) on Tuesday May 24, 2005 @10:46AM (#12623375)
      I gotta agree with you there kickabear. This is the same argument that people make for not touching up old music. The old analog recordings gave older music a tone, warth, and quality that a lot of nodern digital recordings don't have. A lot of musicians still love the old tube amplifiers for the same reason. True music afficianados listen to Jimi Hendrix in non-remastered form.

  • Cashing in on past classics. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by GillBates0 ( 664202 ) on Tuesday May 24, 2005 @10:40AM (#12623310) Homepage Journal
    I remember when a few years ago, when all the cartoons on Cartoon Network were still the Classics ("That's all folks").

    That has changed over the past 5-6 years. At first I thought it was just me outgrowing the charm of cartoons (I'm 27). But then I realized it wasn't me or my tastes that were changing. It was the quality of the new productions that was sadly deteriorating.

    This applies to most of the cartoons produced by the major animation houses in Hollywood - WB, Disney, etc. The new Tom and Jerry cartoons are a joke compared to their witty and charming predecessors. It seems that most of the focus now is on better animation and special effects through computer animation, and less focus on the *wit* and everyday humor that made them so popular in the first place.

    Take any old Tom and Jerry cartoon (directed by Fred Quimby) - you'll see it based on a cat and mouse chase in the familiar settings of a house or backyard. Fastforward to their newer counterparts (incidentally directed by Chuck Jones) and you'll see a sophisticated setting like a Spaceship or France, with better graphics, but almost *no* wit or simple but *clever* plots that were common in the episodes of old.

    The same holds for the Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Mickey Mouse and other classics. The trend seems to be towards slicker animation, with little or *no* emphasis to creative wit/humor. The newer cartoons are all rehashes or remakes of the successful plots with smaller "Tiny Toon" versions of the characters.

    I prefer completely new (and independently produced, I think) cartoons like Johnny Bravo, Courage the Cowardly Dog, etc better to these incredibly non-creative rehased versions of the classics, that the studios seem to want to cash in on.

    /rant.

    • I love Chuck Jones's Warner Brothers' cartoons. But his rendition of Tom & Jerry just didn't have the life or quality of the older MGM productions. One gets the impression that his heart just wasn't in it.

    • Re:Cashing in on past classics. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Secrity ( 742221 ) on Tuesday May 24, 2005 @11:37AM (#12623899)
      " I remember when a few years ago, when all the cartoons on Cartoon Network were still the Classics ("That's all folks").

      That has changed over the past 5-6 years. At first I thought it was just me outgrowing the charm of cartoons (I'm 27). But then I realized it wasn't me or my tastes that were changing. It was the quality of the new productions that was sadly deteriorating.      "

      I think that there are two main reasons for this: The classic "cartoons" were made for a mixed audience, either to be shown with feature motion pictures or to be shown on prime time television. The quality of the classic cartoons was intended to be good and the stories were intended to appeal to adults. The original Flintstones episodes included cigarette advertising with the characters smoking Winstons (they stopped smoking when Pebbles was born).

      Cartoons have since then degenerated to be child entertainment. The fact that cartoons are now considered to be children's entertainment, along with skin flint budgets and tight schedules makes for crappy cartoons.

  • Should read 'classic cartoons marred by (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Senor_Programmer ( 876714 ) on Tuesday May 24, 2005 @10:41AM (#12623326)
    half assed restoration'. But no, gotta blame the Digits. Where's the personal responsibility. The Digits had nothing to do with this. I think what happened is they took a stab at restoring Popeye in the Land of the Goons and are now being, for all intents and purposes, blackballed. It was thought that all copies had been destroyed. Cultural sensitivity trumps culture, you know. Can't portray cargo cult and head hunters in a negative light.

    If anyone has a pointer to a copy of 'Popeye in the Land of the Goons', I have been looking for years...
  • Some characters have dissapeared completely anyways.

  • No worry (Score:4, Funny)

    by icecow ( 764255 ) on Tuesday May 24, 2005 @10:44AM (#12623354)
    Don't worry too much, they still have the original. When the tech comes along they'll do it right and be happy to sell them again. After a little more time they will repackage the first version again as 'classic cut version, the original footing'

  • Website with lots of examples of the issue (Score:4, Informative)

    by CuriousKangaroo ( 543170 ) on Tuesday May 24, 2005 @10:44AM (#12623356)

    Here is David Mackenzie's website (mentioned in the WSJ article, but not linked), which shows a lot of examples:

    http://lyris-lite.net/dnr.html [lyris-lite.net]

  • 50 years from now (Score:2, Insightful)

    by xufos ( 871862 )
    It makes me think, are current digital media that we used today need to be "restored" in next 50 years? Who knows what kind of storage technology we use then...

    • Re:50 years from now (Score:2, Informative)

      by Mikito ( 833242 )
      I don't know about visual media, but claims of remastering are already occurring with digital audio recordings. I've seen a number of classical music titles which were originally recorded as fully DDD in the early '80s, but which are now being rereleased with the claim of being remastered for better sound quality.

      How can you get 24 bit sound resolution out of 16 bit source material?

      • Re:50 years from now (Score:4, Informative)

        by bsd4me ( 759597 ) on Tuesday May 24, 2005 @11:31AM (#12623825)

        The mastering step of audio production involves the final EQ, compression/limiting, and output to the final media. When something is remastered, the mix tape is reprocessed. If you have the multitrack tape or stems, then you can remix to a higher bitdepth, saving some rounding/dithering degredation, master from this, and then dither to 16-bit as a final step. If done right, the end result is often better than the original, especially since dithering algorithms and other processing has improved greatly in the last few years.

  • Widescreen vs. Fullscreen cartoons (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Something that often gets forgotten with regards to older cartoons is that most of them were released theatrically first, and were shot in a widescreen format.

    Converting those to the scrunched 4:3 aspect of TV, most of them simply lopped off the edges and zoomed in on a certain part of the actual cartoon.

    If you watch old Tom and Jerry or Droopy cartoons on Cartoon Network, many times it is hard to even tell what is going on, because much of the character action takes place just off screen. Other times, pe

  • Restoration of cartoons & old movies in genera (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 24, 2005 @11:14AM (#12623636)
    It's too easy to consider the concept of poor movie restoration a modern phenomenon. I have the 2-Disc Collector's Edition of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs which includes the outstanding "An Art in its Making" book. The resoration process here consists of recoloring frames from a technology which is basically pigment-based, i.e. the fatigue over time can be plotted and reversed. After that, it's a question of scractch removal from the best prints available. So I've got a DVD of a print that is as least as good as the original print.


    I also have a DVD of Metropolis (1926), restored as best as modern technology will allow. But that's a lost cause, in this instance, since all the movie destruction was accomplished by its 1927 release in the US, and all the present resoration can do is add 15 minutes to the US release, which means there are still 45 minutes missing somewhere, presumed never to be seen. The modern soundtrack uses the original orchestration.

    It's too easy to say that modern resorations get it wrong. The problem is, modern CHEAP restorations don't do as good a job as modern EXPENSIVE restorations, and at that point we have to consider whether the restoration costs will ever be recovered. I don't know if the restoration of Snow White made a profit, but perhaps from Disney's perspective it was more important to have a high-quality modern digital conversion. Although Metropolis is a movie that should be preserved for eternity (750 minor roles plus 30,000 crowd scenes for what ultimately proved to be a gigantic leap beyond Birth of a Nation, a mere decade before; contrast with our modern ability to discuss minor plot and tech improvements over 3 decades between the various Star Wars episodes), it's unlikely that anyone attempting a definitive preservation will ever actually recover the costs involved.


    At the dawn of cinematography, they used the best technology that was available year-by-year. In the late 1960's, much of the film industry moved away from that concept to filming on what is basically consumer-grade Ektachrome, with the Technicolor equipment having been sold off to China. So we have two or more decades of movies that will simply vanish unless we start protecting them now. The problem is, we need to protect the junk as well as the good stuff, in case future generations modify our values. Mre recently, the situation has improved because stock is more likely to be on digital media.


    But when we think we're failing to preserve old movies, we shouldn't necessarily blame ourselves. In recent decades, the original movie makers made that decision for us.

  • I for one.. (Score:2, Insightful)

    by DarthVain ( 724186 )
    fail to see why you need to digital restore Rocket Robin Hood and the like...

  • Absolutely true - and not for images only! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by haggar ( 72771 ) on Tuesday May 24, 2005 @11:41AM (#12623948) Homepage Journal
    I am sure most of you have seen Disney's Fantasia. Well, I have seen it, back in the days of my childhood, at a private projection (therefore, from an old reel). Even though it was very long ago, I have a very vivid memory of that event, because I have always loved classical music, and I thought that Fantasia had some of the best, most inspired and heartfelt, interpretations.

    Then, about 4 years ago we purchased Fantasia on DVD, and as wewatched, I had the strange feeling that "this is just not right". I could not put my finger on it, but the music sounded devoid of excitement.

    Then I remembered an old friend from primary school who had Fantasia on a very old VHS tape, and watched it. The picture had imperfections, the color was not as stable as on the DVD, but nothing that would bother me. And the music - well, it was completely different.

    I came to the conclusion that, during the digital remastering, they must have done some DSP magic to remove noise and stuff, and actually killed it. Yeah, it's kinda the same music, it just feels wooden, to me totally useless. Why are the MPAA companies doing this? Obviously, because they don't care. I imagine that the larger majority of the public would not notice the difference, except that "hey, there's less noise, it must be better, right?".

    • Fantasia (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 24, 2005 @01:12PM (#12624927)
      This is what happened to _Fantasia_. Around 1985 or 1986 in the dawn of the CD era, Disney decided to digitally re-record the entire soundtrack following the original score exactly with a new orchestra. The VHS tape you saw no doubt contains the new recordings. A lot of people felt that the re-recordings were inferior to the original soundtrack, which was conducted by the great Leopold Stokowski. Disney decided to restore the original soundtrack for the DVD. In fact, the digital re-recordings have been out of print for some years and to my knowledge the only soundtrack CD available is now the original recordings conducted by Stokowski. Since you don't like the DVD music, I'm sorry, but it is what the original film had and what you liked was the re-recordings. I don't criticize you for a question of taste, but I want you to realize that the vast majority of fans of this film prefer the original recordings in all its faulty, mono sound. So you see, the VHS tape you saw is arugably the worst of both worlds - inferior video (even you admit this) and a re-recorded soundtrack in place of the original one.

  • I wonder what would happen to "Magical Maestro"? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Rob the Bold ( 788862 ) on Tuesday May 24, 2005 @12:05PM (#12624207)
    In that 1952 Tex Avery classic, a character reaches into the edge of the frame to pluck a "hair" from the image. It would be sad to see this gag lost to digital restoration.

  • Mammy Two-Shoes (Score:3, Interesting)

    by shotgunefx ( 239460 ) on Tuesday May 24, 2005 @12:20PM (#12624358) Journal
    I love how it was so un-PC to have a black stereotype like Mammy but the fix was to make her a an Irish stereotype.

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