Removing Corruption

From the personal camcorder's earliest days through each progressive generation, video quality has improved. The definition of quality is for another time. Videos started to look and sound better. That was before we started to talk about screen ratio (4:3, 16:9, 2.35:1, etc.), video resolution (480, 720, 1080, 1440, 4k, etc.), or frames per second (fps).

While viewing quality improved, problems still persisted that were not obvious to the naked eye. A key problem is that each video is made up of many frames. Some of these frames get corrupted over time. Such a problem comes to the forefront when attempting to bring these videos to current viewing experiences.

Therefore, before any video can be restored, calm patience is needed to evaluate the quality of the source material. When the source material is brought to the atelier workbench, the first action is to carefully correct such corruptions. Why? Because if corruption is not addressed, it can affect every remaining part of the restoration workflow. Either the restored video will keep the corruption and it becomes an eyesore, or the workflow gets damaged.

This is the first true step, not just restoring a video but bringing it closer so that what others see is closer to what memories exist in their mind.

Patiently mitigate the corruption before the restoration can truly begin.