Search

In this article, we explore the potentials and possibilities in activating the silenced, discarded, misidentified, and unwelcome moving image artifacts relating to the film heritage of the Ottoman Empire. The [...]

In the current debate about restitution, which primarily evolves around archaeological and ethnographical collections in Europe, (1) the question of the audiovisual heritage of the Global South opens up the [...]

This article focuses on how audiovisual collections located in established or emerging archives in Latin America and the Caribbean are being activated or reactivated and how they handle keeping old [...]

Pam Wintle (1) is senior film archivist and founder of the Human Studies Film Archive (HSFA) atthe Smithsonian and founding board member for Northeast Historic Film. AMIA: Tell us about [...]

VICTORIA DUCKETT (VD): Thankyou, Sungji, for agreeingto this Zoom interview. I wanted to begin by asking what your role is at the Korean Film Archive. (1) SUNGJI OH (so): I've [...]

VICTORIA DUCKETT (VD): First, thank you for agreeing to talk with me. When I asked Jay [Weissberg, director of the Pordenone Silent Film Festival] whom I should contact for an [...]

It is ironic that on the day I have put aside to write a reflection on film archives in Asia for this second iteration of 'Conversations'--one with Shivendra Singh, founder [...]

As both filmmaker and film preservationist, I am especially aware of the perils and opportunities of this transitional era in moving image archiving. I understand that most avant-garde films, including [...]

With an increased number of local newspapers available online, and with numerous regional library collections now searchable from locations all over the world, investigating itinerant-produced films proves a rich and, [...]

PUBLICATIONS COMMITTEE The Publications Committee's primary charge is the journal. And we can now officially (with 19.2 under our belts along with the double issue you are holding) welcome our [...]

Automatic restoration of old film archives has become of increasing interest in the last few years with the rise of consumer digital video applications and the need to supply more programming material of an acceptable quality in a multimedia context. A technique is described for the optimization of multidimensional grayscale soft morphological filters for applications in automatic film archive restoration, specific to the problem of film dirt removal. The optimization is undertaken with respect to a criterion based on mean absolute error and is performed using a genetic algorithm. Experiments have shown that the filter found using this technique has excellent performance in attenuating/removing film dirt from image sequences and has little, if any, effect on the image detail. The results of applying such a filter to a real image sequence were analyzed and compared to those obtained by restoring the same image sequence using a global filtering approach (LUM filter) and a spatio-temporal local filtering approach (ML3Dex filter with noise detection). From a film dirt removal point of view, the optimized soft morphological filter showed improved results compared to the LUM filter and comparable results with respect to the ML3Dex filter with noise detection. Also, the optimized filter accurately restored all fast-moving objects present in the sequence, without the need for motion compensation, whereas the other two methods failed to do this. The proposed method proved to be a simple, fast, and cheap approach for the automatic restoration of old film archives. Index Terms--Film restoration, filter optimization, genetic algorithms, soft morphology.

Stan Brakhage's provocative and inspirational film 'Window Water Baby Moving' (1962) on the delivery of his child can be included in an archive for the future.