The Technical Restoration
The first video shown here was in poor shape when we started this project. However, the preservation of this material of Dr. Carstensen was important.
The best copy that we had to work with was a DVD that was made from a badly-damaged 28-year old VHS tape. The VHS tape was no longer available to us and all we had to work with was the DVD dub of the tape. The poor resolution of the VHS copy was further complicated by both its degradation with age and its transfer to DVD. As expected, this copy presented many technical problems and produced a poor viewing experience.
To improve the viewing experience, Bill Anderton donated the work for doing basic archial and restoration work. First he made a digital standard-definition master and then applied a series of video filtering and processing techniques using a high-performance computer equipped with special application software for video restoration processing. All in, the 28-minute video required 16 hours of computer computer processing on multi-core Intel i7 processors with GPU support to:
- Filter out as much signal noise as possible
- Brighten
- Sharpen
- De-block
- Enhance the color
The resulting video was improved. As a side-by-side comparison, see below.
The resulting processed master file was then cropped to remove the edge noise inherent in this type of original and encoded in TransformingTheChurch.org's Adaptive Streaming files sets.
