Restoring old footage whether from cine or video is not easy at all. It involves several separate stages with various types of software. The first step is to get you clip you wish to treat, we scan cine film to HD but it still needs more processing, video can be obtained from old tape original sources or from DVDs we had already completed, this saves wearing out now delicate tape media. Particularly with cine we can motion-stabilise it but overdone it makes everything wobbly. This is important because watching film as if it was originally shot on a tripod makes viewing far easier suffering wobbly footage. We can enhance the contrast, brightness and sharpness, as well as apply noise reduction and dust and speckle removal filters. We can organise various clips and adjust them to a realistic speed, old cine cameras often produced the Laurel and Hardy speeded up effect.
How to do this the correct way involves a lot of experience and the treatment of every film will be entirely different. The third step involves upscaling and/or enhancing to 1080p HD using contemporary A.I. software. This process adds a lot of clarity to almost any footage. In itself this stage is not too difficult providing you know how to set the correct parameters about which we are still learning but the processing times are huge, often over night or even several days. Another step would be to colourise old B&W material. A very good software tool for this purpose is Deoldify but this takes you into the realm of dos beyond my current ability but we are watching progress. The final step is to add sound and any commentary or titles plus our now usual greeting and introduction.www.pmpfilms.com the worlds largest collection of transport hobby DVDs featuring buses, lorries, trams and trolleybuses worldwide. Also a vast array of archives you never see on RU-vid! Plus digital downloads and links to half a million still images.Welcome to the world of PMP films owned by Dave and Mandy Spencer. It is really a hobby for us and we take great pleasure in meeting with other transport enthusiasts around the world.
As video faded as a format we started to produce DVDs and in 2010 commenced filming in HD or high definition which produces startling quality although it handles motion less well. Our films feature transport items unless stated otherwise. This means natural sound with no narration or music added. We are not a Hollywood production company so don't expect Ice Road Truckers, our budget is a tank of fuel not a million dollars. One customer complained that his trucking DVD had nothing but trucks on it- you just cannot win. After having a knee replacement in Sept 2015 Dave retired from his 'day' job and now works full time bringing you more films than ever.
For snail mail or reference you can download our order form which can be posted or emailed through to us. Use the links to our Smug Mug site for purchasing still photos and downloads. Digital still downloads for all our images was added in 2018 on our Smugmug site together with the introduction of DVD digital downloads on this our own site. Digital downloads for DVDs are on our shop for releases mid 2018 onwards.
The Ticket-Boo series is another recent introduction indicating that the images are all selected from HD scanned cine film for archives with a high standard of reproduction. We are now experimenting with Topaz artificial intelligence software.
Our vision is that aged 70 sales will become more digitally based reducing the time and effort of handling materials and gradually reduce our rally attendance to a core of top events.
We are a not to profit business as any funds are used to further the archive and to invest in better equipment plus ensure the continued availability of our material. We shall be slowly changing the terminology to the PMP Film Archive.
Some archive master copies on the shop are available for download ( historic research enthusiast use or viewing) together with commercial use licence, down load the licence and DVD together and it will give rights to use up to 15 minutes in commercial productions or use worldwide including repeats. This is way below standard industry rates of £40 a second. The shop should be self financing and easy to maintain through to future generations and media development. The original cine film is being lodged with the Online Transport Archive. We are now scanning our archive and OTA film for easy access and to protect the original film from constant usage.
Please use the PMP shop rather than EBay as you get the same service whatever mode you use and buying direct ensures we get the maximum funding to prepare our next film trip. Our previous links to Amazon were deleted due to constant harassment and bullying by them
23 окт 2021
