Uncategorized

The Issue of Degradation, Part 2

Maybe some of you have migrated your collections to hard disks (HDD). You may have had a collection of DVDs and CDs but copied them on HDD, got rid of all the physical collections and are quite happy about it. An 1TB hard disk costs less than DVD box set these days and can hold hundreds of movies. Directories and folder management is much easier and faster than going through a clatter of disks. I do have some movies on HDD and find them quite useful and easy. But when it comes to trusting HDD, it’s a different story. There …

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JAPANESE FILMS

The Issue of Degradation, Part 1

Old films have scratches, moldings, tears, color fade and many other forms of deterioration. They have happened, are happening and will happen. Nitrate films are combustible and prone to catch fire easily, while acetates are prone to hydrolysis, causing ‘vinegar syndrome’. Colors will fade. Sprockets may disintegrate. In many cases, no original negative has survived and only material available to us is a poorly handled dupes. Copying analogue data (images on films) always degrades the quality of the original, such as sharpness, brightness, grayscale/color balances and audio clarity. People often have said preserving the film prints and negatives is not …

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Uncategorized

Film, digital.

When the next summer blockbusters come to the nearest cinema complex, all of them would be packed with dazzling arrays of digitally generated images. In fact, it will be extremely difficult to find a film without any digital post processing these days. If you sit through ridiculously long end credits for some of the recent Hollywood entertainment films, you will find large percentage of the personnel are involved in post production digital image processing. The total control of production process by digital technologies has made the business of movie industry more adapt to DVD and BluRays, flooding the markets with …

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