Film Digitization

Color Culture and Science Journal, Colour Photography and Film, Vol. 14, No. 01 (2022), p.64-72
Giorgio Trumpy, David Pfluger, Lutz Garmsen
Some of the first home movies shot in color used a 16mm lenticular film produced by Kodak from 1928 to the late 1930s. This very special film stock called Kodacolor is embossed with an array of hundreds of vertical cylindrical lenses that allowed recording color scenes on a black-and-white panchromatic silver emulsion. There are multiple possible methods to extract the color information from the film images. Scanning the silver emulsion in high-resolution and letting a software extract the encoded color information represents an efficient method to obtain digital color images from these historical motion pictures. In this context, a new approach based on artificial intelligence has demonstrated to be more efficient for the localization of the lenticular screen than other previous methods. An alternative solution consists in digitizing the color images while these are created with the original optical method. While this last approach has the advantage of better representing the original historical appearance, it requires specific equipment and skilled operators.

Film digitization specialist prepares for second phase of IU's ambitious preservation project

BY MARAH HARBISON | Sep. 11, 2017

Carla Arton at Indiana University’s Media Digitization and Preservation Initiative has been tasked with overseeing the digitization of 12,500 hours of film.

Just watching all of that film nonstop, for 24 hours a day, would take nearly a year and a half. Yet the plan to convert each reel of film to a digital format, run quality control on every single file, perform color correction and post-production restoration on key titles in the collection and make many of the films accessible via the IU Libraries' website is slated to be completed by the university’s bicentennial in 2020.
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