Removing Corruption from Videos

Time is a challenge. Just as time fogs the mind and what one might remember, it affects old media. Time has a way of altering media, and it is a slow, unmonitored process. This degradation takes time, and that can be leveraged so that when restoration is attempted, the end state is that much closer to what one requires. More than that, removing this degradation is critical to proper restoration.

Every video is a series of frames. A frame in a series may break down over time. If the old media is played, the play is often successful to the human eye. However, if the corrupted frames are not recovered or removed, then the entire restoration workflow can grind to a halt at any step of the process. This is expensive because the restoration workbench was used only for this restoration flow and that lost time and resource cannot be recovered.

A simple but critical fix is to use a program such as Handbrake to address the corruption first. To many people, HandBrake is a program for compressing or converting video before sharing it. In a restoration workflow, it serves a different purpose. It can normalize problematic source material into a form that downstream tools can process reliably. While such a program is often used as a final step before distributing media (or making it ready for consumption), in the world of video restoration, it is used at the beginning of the workflow. As the frames are corrected, comparing the original video to the restoration is like a fog lifting from the mind.