Wes Archer's JAC MAC & RAD BOY GO! - 16mm Film Restoration Documentary

this is pee Hicks I recently did a sort of amateur film restoration for the animator Wes Archer who created a classic bit of animation in 1985 called Jack Mac and rad boy go and this is a film that I had seen at different animation festivals and on night flight on cable TV and different places and I loved it as a kid and long story short I recently got in touch with Wes and he sent me down a copy of an original 16 millimeter print of the film to scan and restore because he didn't have a high quality copy himself so I'm gonna take you quickly through the basic process of getting the film into the computer and restoring it and getting it to look really good and sharp so the first step in the process is scanning the film so this is a movie stuff retro scan Universal which is a reasonably affordable film scanner and here you see it going through the Machine and into the computer this is the capture software where we're capturing it frame by frame in TIFF format and now we have to capture the audio separately so this is a projector going into a special box which registers the frames the the shutter and synchronizes the audio to the shutter so that when you bring it in to the computer the audio is locked in sync with the 24 frames per second and now we're gonna quickly do some audio restoration these are some thumpy sounds that are being produced by the projector that I want to get rid of so here I'm using iZotope rx software for the noise reduction and then just sort of a general kind of broadband noise reduction here the audio from this 16 millimeter print is never gonna sound great but we can make some slight improvements to it [Music] okay so now we're gonna bring the TIF sequence at 24 frames per second and the audio into Vegas Pro which is the video editing software that I use and we're going to do sort of a basic initial noise reduction on the on the film itself there's the audio synchronized to the video and the playback is a little choppy because those are uncompressed tips alright so for video noise reduction I use a plug-in called neat video and you take a sample of neutral noisy area in the film and I'm gonna do some basic noise reduction and sharpening with neat video you can also do dust removal scratch removal that sort of thing you can see a scratch on the on the film right there but as you'll see in a bit see I can remove that but I decided not to and I'll show you in a minute why I decided not to go with the dust and scratch removal but the noise reduction and the sharpening and I'm like cranking the sharpening up all the way to the max because that's what looked best in this case these things work pretty well and they make the film look a lot better than the raw scan so now that note the dust and scratch removal unfortunately tends to have the effect of removing things that you don't want it to remove like here it's taking out part of Jack Mack's arms so instead of doing that I'm going to remove that stuff manually by hand so this is in Photoshop and you load the frames in one by one or in small batches and you just gotta put in the hours of locating all these little things that you don't want in there and taking them out this film is about four minutes long and it has a bit over 5,000 frames so you do the math fortunately I was able to clean the film pretty well and mostly eliminate the actual physical dust and things that were on it but you still have a lot of these white marks which are things that crept in in the negative itself which are permanently on the film so if you want to get rid of them you have to go in and do it this way and it's a lot of little marks and things you know I tried to to preserve things that were part of the film itself but not necessarily intended you can see in some sequences some some pencil lines and things on the film that maybe Wes didn't fully intend to be in the finished film but they are a part of the artwork and so I like to preserve stuff like that because it's part of the character of this sort of old-school way of doing things since we have computers now we can get everything perfect and you know there's no flaws like this but back in the day you had all kinds of stuff like that so I like to preserve some of it and eliminate some of it okay so the next thing we're gonna do is we need to steady the film because when you scan it in there's always a bit of it's called gate weave where the the frames move around a bit more than you want them to so what I do is I scan the film in with the sprocket holes fully visible and then I can use those as a registration reference to steady the frames and now Vegas doesn't have a great tool for this so I'm using DaVinci Resolve which has really good planar tracking tools and so what you do is you draw a box around your sprocket holes and then you can scan then you scan the entire film through and it creates a tracking reference so that you can steady the sprocket holes so that they don't deviate from each other and then hopefully that will make the frames generally stable it's not a hundred percent perfect but it's a lot better than doing nothing where your image is jumping around in the frame a lot so now we're tracking the film and you have to go through the entire film I'm not doing that here and then you put it into steady mode and you can see that the sprocket holes are locked pretty steady and and it's much more stable and then from here you export another tip sequence out of here and then re-import it back into into Vegas so there's a steadied frames will go back into tracking mode to show the unstudied frames and then the steadied frames once again you now we're going to do some color correcting and I'm using Wes's VHS copy as a basic color reference here I didn't try to match the color slavishly but I wanted to at least get the white balance right which is what I'm doing here comparing the VHS to the film and then putting in some white balance and I also wanted the colors to pop even more so than on the VHS so I really kind of cranked up the saturation there's the film the a chest film VHS film VHS film and the next thing that needs to be done is we need to crop it because you can see at the top of the frame there's a little l-shaped hair and that is on the film that so it's not a piece of dust it's you know it's on the actual film and it's in the entire middle of the film and thousands of frames and I really didn't want to manually remove every last one of those so we decided the best thing to do especially since the VHS copy is cropped we decided to just crop it out so here I'm just fine-tuning the cropping to get rid of that little hair and now here's a [Music] comparison sequence of the VHS to the final result [Music] [Applause] [Music] right and that's about it so I hope you enjoyed this little walkthrough and he'll watch the finished film it's a classic