What Does It Mean When a Movie Undergoes 4K Restoration?

The partnership between the movie industry and technology has a long and exciting history. As such, production studios are using the best cameras of the time to give their audience the best possible visuals on the big screen.

However, technology changes with time; what was the best in the 1980s is no longer the best in the late 2000s, and what's best in the late 2000s is not the best in the early 2020s.

As a result, the more technology advances, the more dated the movies of the past feel. Fortunately, there is a way of bringing them back to the modern era for modern displays: digital restoration.

What Is Video Restoration?

To make a low-resolution video viewable in a higher resolution, people may want to look into video restoration.

Video restoration is the process of recovering a clean video sequence from its degraded version, per Springer. The whole process removes noise, reduces blur, and increases the resolution of a video to produce a higher-resolution one than the original video.

This resolution upgrade means that old movies and videos can be viewed at 4K resolution easily with the right software.

There is a catch though. Premium Beat states in its article that restoring a video takes away the chance to watch the original video as it was intended to be seen unless a digital version closer to the original video is present.

However, this process can be used to reliably save films that have never been converted from their original negatives from being lost forever.

The process of restoring a video is different from upscaling one. According to Shotkit, it is the process of increasing a video's resolution, allowing old videos to be playable on devices they were not originally meant to be played on.

This process also applies to video recordings captured with smartphones and old digital point-and-shoot cameras with low resolution to be viewable on a full HD TV or a high-resolution computer monitor.

However, it doesn't make a video viewable in a higher resolution, as it only uses the pixels of the original video to fill in the gaps in a display to make it viewable on a modern display.

How To Restore a Video

Restoring a video in the past took a look at work. According to CGTN, technicians needed to mend and clean the original film and scan them into 2k or 4K digital formats before adjusting images, audio, colors, and resolutions and removing scratches to the film.

All these are done frame by frame - tedious work for technicians, but the results are worth the effort of going through them one by one.

After these, technicians will transform the footage from the old, repaired plastic and gelatin cine film to digital film.

What is challenging is keeping every detail, such as the original tone of colors, lighting, and quality of the original film into consideration while restoring a film.

For more modern videos, there are third-party software and AI available to upscale old or low-resolution videos to higher resolutions, making them as clear as the day they were recorded, per Any Video Converter.