The Offset Podcast - The Offset Podcast EP048: Dealing With Archival Part 1

Episode Date: February 2, 2026

Productions of all types and sizes often rely on archival and stock footage, but not all archival is created equal and some content can be wrought with issues. While its easy to just to say 'inherent to source' and ignore issues with these types of sources, a lot of problems can be addressed in a pretty straight forward manner.  In this episode we're starting a two part series on dealing with archival sources and how to get them looking their best.  We'll start out in this show exploring general issues with archival and stock and then explore film originated archival issues - issues you'll often encounter and ways to address them.  In part 2, we'll focus on video orginated specific challenges. In this episode some of the specifics we'll discuss include:Big picture issues with archival - aspects ratios, resolution, and codecs/containersManaging texture and grain with film orginated archival Film restoration toolsetsPulldown cadence issues and repeated framesAdditional problems with film orginated archival sources - gate weave, color layer separation etcBe sure to like it and subscribe to the podcast wherever you found it and be sure to check out our growing library of episodes.  If you like the podcast it'd mean the world to us if you'd consider supporting the show by buying us a cup of virtual coffee -https://buymeacoffee.com/theoffsetpodcastSee you in about two weeks for a new episode.

Hey everybody, welcome back to another installment of the Offset podcast. And this week, we're beginning a two-part series on dealing with archival sources. Stay tuned. Support for this episode comes from Flanders Scientific. You can catch the team at BSC Expo in London, February 13th and 14th, 2026. Just head over to Booth 206. Head to the show for a closer look at FSI reference monitoring, broadcast, and post-workflows, and exciting new products. You can learn more at Flanders Scientific.

All right, hey there, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of the Offset Podcast. With me, as always, is my partner in crime, Joey Deanna. How are you doing, Joey? Good. Hey, everybody. So, Joey, this week I want to talk about dealing with archival sources, and I thought we kind of break this up into two separate kind of episodes, because knowing us, we're

going to pontificate about a lot of this stuff. Kind of first treat kind of the general picture in dealing with film archival. And then in part two, we'll dive into some more. some more specifics about dealing with video sources and some of the unique challenges there. So kind of breaking this up into two different bits. Just as a reminder, we are still running our viewer and audience survey. You can find that right here at the link on the page. We're going to keep that open for about another week to two weeks.

We've received a few dozen replies to that survey, and they've been awesome. They're really helping us sort of shape what the rest of 2026 is going to look. like we're excited to start rolling out some of those new initiatives up pretty soon. But if you do have a chance to fill out the survey, really appreciate it. As always, wherever you're listening to the show, whether it be on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, whatever, do us a favor and like and subscribe. Every little like and every subscribe helps us get the show out to more people. And then lastly, if you're on the social media, feel free to follow us on Instagram or

Facebook. You can just search for us at the Offset Podcast. And of course, you can always head over to The Offsetpodcast.com to check out our full library of shows as well as view of show notes and things like that. All right, Joey, let's dive into it, man. This is like this is something that I think that archival, it's one of those things that people kind of just go, oh, yeah, it's archival. We'll just throw it into the show or the film or whatever and everything will be all right. And I think you have this interesting analogy about archival, and specifically when it comes to things like interlaced.

And to paraphrase it and correct me if I'm wrong when you're summing you up here, it's basically something like, no kids, TV didn't look that bad back when that aired, right? Like, you know, that kind of thing. And I think that's an overwhelming theme for the show is that you get an archival source and you sort of just assume, hey, that's what it is, right? And that's not always the case. Like, there are steps that could have been mistaken,

but there's also fixes that can be employed to try to get that footage to look its best, right? Yeah, and the reason I really wanted to do this episode is because I see it all the time. I come from a documentary background and a kind of nonfiction TV background. You've done a whole gigantic amount of documentary work yourself. So we are kind of, we've been deep in the documentation,

world for a long time, you know, from got 20 years each of us, basically. And I really feel like, and I hate to say this, the way archival or historical sources has been treated in more and more documentaries that I'm seeing, and I'm including really prestige, high budget, expensive documentaries on major streaming services, major networks. I feel like the archival sources are. not being treated with the care and respect that they deserve, and they're not being presented in the highest fidelity way possible. And I think a lot of that, a lot of it is not out of laziness or lack of budget or even lack of the ability to get the best possible source or conversion of them,

which of course, that's always a possibility. But I think a lot of people out there, especially, you know, I don't want to pick on the younger guys. But People that weren't there for when these sources and these technologies were new don't necessarily understand everything that went into making the image from something like an interlaced camera or a telecine or a film scan or any of these kind of things that we now just get as a file and drop in our timeline and just assume, hey, it is what it is. This is about as good as it's going to look. We're going to move on. In most cases, you know, you're kind of deep. default what you're seeing on the screen might not be the be all end all of not only the original but what the source that you have even if it's been through trans codes and captures and things like that what is available in that source for you to put on the screen so as finishers as editors as colorists I think if you're gonna be in the

documentary space there are a million different things that we can talk about and kind of help and explain where You really can get more out of this footage. And that's good for everyone. It's good for your clients. It's good for the viewer. I think we need as a community and as an industry to go back to a higher level of quality when we do our documentaries when it comes to these archive sources.

It's just a pet peeve of mine. I see it in these prestige docs. And I'm like, guys, what are you doing? Yeah, I generally, I think I generally agree. I will say that we have all watched films, documentaries, etc., that, the crappiness of archival is sometimes an advantage, right? It's, you know, it can be a storytelling tool to kind of separate that content from the normal documentary, you know, acquired stuff that somebody shot, right?

I get that, right? Like, hey, we don't want to make this to look too good. It's archival. We don't want to get people confused about what's, you know, the stuff we shot versus the stuff that's old. But in a general sense, I do agree with you that I think that too many people just go, it's archival, it is what it is, you know, that phrase and just, you know, kind of just, you know, cut it in. And this even applies, by the way, I think to, we're going to do a whole other episode here pretty soon on dealing with kind of like film restoration kind of stuff.

But like, you know, I think that also plays into like that whole aspect of, well, it is what it is, but we also don't want to make it like we want to be authentic to what it is, but not realizing that authenticity is misplaced. Like it was never that crappy. It didn't look like that originally. So if your goal is to just make it like, oh, well, we don't want to make it to look too good, but not realizing what the original look like, I think you're right. You're doing disservice to what that original content is, and it could be better. So I think we're in agreement there. Let's start big picture, 50,000 foot view about this, right?

Because I think there are some issues that kind of are germane to wherever the source is, right? Whether it's, you know, film, archival, whether it's video archival, whether it's bought from a stock footage house. And the three things that I see there, and see if you agree with, we can expound on these a little bit more. Aspect ratio issues, right? I think we deal with resolution issues.

People were like, oh, well, I found this clip, and it was 320 by 240. It can go right into my UHD project fine, right? That's not an issue, right? And then, you know, I think this idea of, you know, continuity issues or, like, you know, like, you know, glitches. like you might find issues where like, oh, there's dropped frames in this. There's all sorts of things, right, that can happen.

Let's talk about those for a second. Let's start with the first one, aspect ratio. When you look at a piece of archive, how are you evaluating whether the aspect ratio is correct? And what's the right way or wrong way to correct for an aspect ratio that might be not correct? Yeah, and this is one of those things where I'm extremely dogmatic about it. I do not believe in changing aspect ratios. I think basically if you are stretching something, you're always doing it wrong.

It can be a creative decision if you get, for example, a four by three image and you need to put it into a 16 by nine container, do you pillar box it or do you crop the top and bottom? What you never do, ever, is stretch it out. But here's what people sometimes do that, like the blurred version behind, So it's, you know, you're not getting in pillar box, but you know, that kind of thing. I personally hate that.

I hate that look, but I do see it has its place. As long as the actual image is still its original aspect ratio, I would still put that into the realm of technically correct. However, what you really got to look out for is you don't know how many times this has been converted before it got to you. It could have a 10% stretch one direction or the other. It could have been stretched out horizontally to the wrong aspect ratio. So it's worth your time. If something looks a little off, try to find a circle in that image and see if that circle is close to a circle, right? Try to find something that you know can be a visual reference point to see, hey, did this get adjusted a little bit before it came to me?

And should I put it back to its original aspect ratio? Then kind of hand in hand with what you talked about with resolution. Obviously, we can't always get the highest resolution sources, but let resolution sometimes dictate what you, and granted, it's not always our decision. Sometimes it's a creative stakeholder, like a director or a producer's decision of how to handle letterboxing or pillar boxing. But obviously, we're going to be at least asked for a recommendation in most cases. If your footage is leaning towards the lower end of the resolution spectrum, no matter what its source, you probably don't want to try to push in full frame. cutting off the top and bottom and then getting that full frame 16 by 9

out of a 4 by 3 image because you're just now getting rid of another 40% of your resolution by doing that. So in those cases, I mean, personally, I think we have, the viewership world has evolved past caring about letterboxing

or pillar boxing because we've gone from TV, then movies in TV with letterboxing, then TV in 16 by 9 with pillar boxing, then mixed together, then random howling, Hollywood movies going from IMAX to normal to IMAX again for no reason. The viewing public doesn't care about changing aspect ratios mid-show nearly as much as they used to.

So I always say pillar box, if at all, possible. But be wary when you do that of the resolution and also be wary of the edges. We'll talk a little bit more about edges later. But, you know, just cutting it to top and bottom and side to side, you might even want to crop them a little bit more on the edges so that way when you cut between different shots that letterbox or that pillar box doesn't wiggle you know sometimes it's worth making a four by three container for your four by three sources in a dock so you don't see crap on the crap on the edges right yeah basically so they're all pillar boxed but they're not all very slightly

different pillar boxed right it's a way it's a way to make you more uniform yeah i see that so i mean i think the aspect ratio and identifying the circles a great great tip there but i see this also, like let's take, let's take this aspect from like the buyer or the person, the editor who's acquiring this footage, right? Like, the first thing they even just think about is, like, you're out of stock footage place or you're looking through archival is like, okay, well, I have a, you know, a 16 by 9 show and all of this stuff is four by three that I'm, that I'm looking at. It's coming up with a plan on how to attack it that is providing consistency, but also providing, you know, image fidelity in the way that you attack it is, I think,

you're really saying. And I think I have one more kind of overarching thing that I would say when I, when I think about archival and stock sources, is a lot of times you have to think about kind of like the codec and container and also what the end use is going to be. And what I mean by end use is two things. One, how heavily are you going to push this, right? Because if you get something and you're like, you know, you're working with a director or producer and like, yeah, we really want to like, you know, do a big look on this stuff, whatever, if you have something, you know, that's 720 by 480 motion JPEG from a stock house, right? Like, you're going to be a little limited in, one, you're scaling and how you present it.

Two, how much you can actually push color and contrast in that image without it falling in support. So the other thing I always suggest to people is like, hey, look, if you can get this in higher quality containers and codex, that is always going to be advantageous to you, right? And what's even more advantageous to me a lot of times is some of these stockplaces and archival stuff will actually give you sort of a, chain of custody kind of rundown of the actual piece like how like original source was three quarter right we transferred this to whatever right that's great to know that like okay this is the second generation of this or whatever like so following up on those details with archival source or stockhouse always a big thing to do as well yeah so you know those are things that kind of apply to anything right there's four by three film there's 16 by nine film there's four by

video, there's 16 by 9 video, there's stills of a million different aspect ratios, right? The big thing is, don't go stretching stuff. That's, that's always a no go. But let's, and don't scale in 900% and don't try to do magic with crappy containers and codex. Exactly. Right. So now let's talk about kind of the film world, right? Because, you know, when we come, when it comes to both stock footage and old. newsreels and anything from the past 100 or more years, there's a good chance film as an acquisition is going to be involved in your documentary, even if you never shot a frame of film. And film has a lot of unique issues specific to it that we need to treat, again, with respect to the authentic source. Biggest one, texture and grain. What's your kind of stance on how to best.

deal with texture and grain in the overall context of a documentary when you get these film sources. Yeah, it's a great question. And I want to just, before I answer that, I want to just say one more higher level thing that I don't think that we're going to really dive into in this section, but I think it's worth pointing out here just in case you do have a mythical, you know, a unicorn budget where you can do this kind of thing, right? I just, I, last night, snow's outside, kids are asleep. I'm like, I got, what am I going to watch on TV tonight? Couldn't find a thing and I find myself going back to watch that Challenger, the Space Shuttle Challenger doc on Netflix that was a couple years ago, right? And we talked about this before, like, we were both

blown away by that documentary because we had seen a lot of those sources before and never seen them look as good as they did in this documentary when we were like, oh my God, there must be some sort of magic formula that they have. Specifically when it comes to film archival, if you have a unicorn budget and there is a way to go back and rescan the original films with modern technology, that is obviously going to be your best bet because then you can decide on all of this. Texture, denoising, framing, all of that kind of stuff and you're doing it optically, which is going to be the best quality potential that you're going to get, right? I think for this section about talking about film archival, we're going to assume that you don't

have a unicorn budget to go back and rescan original 8, 16, and 35 millimeter sources or whatever to get the best out of it. But I just want to point out that for the highest level, that is often the best choice when it comes to archival is find the original, re-scan

it, and start fresh. But assuming you can't do that, let me answer the noise and grain question. I am of two minds of this. I think that particularly on 16 mil that was so popular, in, you know, I mean, 60s, you know, 70s, 80s, whatever, right?

Like, for news gathering, for all that kind of stuff, I tend to think that the grain in it puts somebody in a mood and genre, and they can identify it very easily as being, oh, this is archival. And because it's, you know, a natural grain source because of all the emulsions of the film and whatever, whatever, it just feels different than,

hey, I slap some grain on my video. it's filmic, right? It definitely has that feel. With that said, some of it can be way, way too noisy, right? And I think that the way that I think about film archival is I always try to kind of respect what the original source kind of looks like in that context, but almost always I'm doing some level of light noise reduction. And that's even more so, like the one thing I think about that is not necessarily on a single clip basis, but is by, I'm not. I'm not. I'm not, doing noise reduction in an attempt to get like a sequence of archival shots to feel about the same in terms of grain level and grain structure and all.

And another way of doing that, of course, is that you might heavily de-noise and then reapply your own grain for consistency, right? But in general, I like to kind of blend the two together, right? Like, keep some of that original grain, do some noise reduction for some consistency. But, you know, it's going to be a little dependent on that. How do you feel about it? Yeah, I agree. I think one of the challenges with documentaries is a lot of times the story is woven together in the edit.

But visual continuity isn't something that can really judge in the offline edit. And in some cases, doesn't really matter for the story. For example, if you have a series of events that happen, A, B, C, D in this order, and they present them A, B, C, in this order, but the sources for B have been degraded heavily where the sources for C are pristine, it's going to knock the viewer's head a little bit, continuity-wise, going A, B, C, D in order. So it's kind of, it falls on us a little bit

to not, like you said, not remove all the grain, not replace all the grain, try to balance shot by shot a little bit. In that regard, it looks like the story. Yeah, and I'm sorry to interrupt, but I was just going to say in that regard, like sometimes it's about making the good stuff a little less good, right? I mean, so like, you know, we have to meet in the middle to make a sequence work.

Yeah, yeah. And so specifically, like, I think that's like, we've encountered this in the past, you know, a few years even. Like, we did a series about kind of like the nuclear age, if you will, and a lot of like old, like military footage, testing footage, you know, like, you know, nuclear bombs going off and stuff. And you'd have these beautiful, perfect scams that had very little. grain and then you had somebody's crappy little camera, you know, like a, you know, a little

eight miller, you know, eight millimeter, Zapruder, you know, type film camera, right? And then we had some that had gamma radiation corruption. Right. And so like in that case, it's like, okay, well, unfortunately, we're not going to be able to bring the crappy stuff up. So it's more like, hey, on the good stuff, we actually grained it a little bit more to flow from like a grain continuity standpoint with the rest of the stuff. But when you're doing that, I'll just say this. It's not just getting the slider right.

Take a still or even take a small playback of the grains you're trying to match and zoom way the hell in on your viewer. See how much color is in that grain. See how big the chunks are. See how much amplitude as in the contrast

is in it. You'd be surprised how much you can match grain, especially even using the built-in film grain in resolve. If you go in that little advanced tab where you can dial in the color channels, you can dial in the shadows, the midtones, and the highlights, you could dial in things like size. If you, you know, don't rely on your eye and your feel on it full frame. If your goal is to technically match this grain so these two shots line up, don't be afraid to zoom way the hell in and look at that grain in detail and take some time when you're doing that match,

because it does matter. And it does help the flow of the film. So related, what do you feel about some other problems with film? Things like dust and scratches, gate weave, even something, you know, severe, like a tear or a hole in that particular frame. Like, you know, I'm of two minds of this kind of stuff because, again, I want its archival. It's meant to be kind of like, this is, you know, what it was. but at the same time, as we've already said,

that's not what it was originally probably. Nobody was like, oh, yeah, cool, we have a hole in the frame. Like, let's go with that, right? So in the, in the, I'm curious about how you approach some of those things, but also is there a point, and I think this is a larger view for this section, is there a point where you're, this is a little bit beyond color, specifically when it comes to film frame stuff? And this is more about a restoration artist doing a little bit more than you can

do in the context of a color grading application. Yeah, absolutely. I my general philosophy is for tears, dust, scratches. If we can get them out in a non-distracting way, absolutely do it unless, like you said, there's a creative reason to keep them in. It's supposed to look degraded. It's supposed to look like somebody stepped on this reel and left it in the toilet for a while. You know, uh, we have at our disposal.

I think people would be surprised if they dig into Resolves film restoration toolset. We have a very, very set of potent weapons to deal with film problems. I just want to talk about some of my favorites. When it comes to dust, the automatic dust busting, shockingly good. And normally, automatic things don't work too great. But what the automatic dust busting does, It essentially uses the optical flow algorithms of resolve where it looks at motion across frames.

And if it sees one frame of a splotch that's not supposed to be there, it'll blend the previous and next frames into that splotch to get rid of it. So it basically knows, okay, there is motion vectors of somebody's face. And having these splotches for one frame doesn't make sense. So throw that on there and give it a look,

step frame by frame, looking for any artifacts and any negatives, the one thing you've got to be real careful with, especially when you're doing the automatic dust removal, is it only works if your temporal data is intact. What I mean by that is you don't have things like repeated or blended frames because it's literally relying on the relationship of one frame to the next, to the next to the next.

So it will do incredibly great things on temporally coherent footage on non-coherent footage, it's going to give you artifacts or no results, things like that. That's where the normal dust buster effect comes into play, which is a completely manual tool where you literally land on a frame,

drag a box around the piece of dust, and it will, depending on if you drag the box down to the right or down to the left, take out that chunk from the previous frame or the next frame, and you can manually go in and paint those things out. So it's one of those things where you can get into, you can get into too much detail. If you find yourself, you are going frame by frame, painting out a thousand pieces of

dust or dirt, unless it's absolutely critical, maybe that's the point where you recommend to the client, hey, let's send this to a dedicated film restoration artist. And it's worth the money to do that. But for a lot of cases, you'd be surprised how far you can get with the built-in tools. And look, it doesn't have to be perfect it doesn't have to be every piece of dust every scratch if you knock out 50% of them 60% of them it's a huge your overall image is going to

look so much smoother on playback it's going to help the viewer yeah so I think those are all those are great tools too and I would also add to that mix too don't forget about things that are more traditionally video kind of repair tools like patch replaceer dead pixel fixer those kind of

things they can in a pinch they can work great for this kind of thing like I had one a couple weeks ago where there was like a little like burned out spot for like two frames on the side of somebody's cheek. Patch replacer with a couple key frames worked great. Also, don't forget. I think people forget this all the time, by the way. This is just a general resolve note. That OFX, most of them can be tracked in some, not most of them, but the ones that like I'm talking about actually can be tracked.

Like down in your tracking palette, there is an OFX tracker, right? So like if you did want to use something like a, you know, Deadpix. or a patch replacer or something like that. You can do that or, of course, keyframes will work as well. Now, you mentioned something just a moment ago that I think is a whole can of worm, so I apologize for opening it, but I do think it's important. You had to mention this idea of cadence, right, and repeated frames and that kind of stuff. Here's what I want you to do.

I want you to identify for me what that issue is, how somebody sees it, but then also where does it most likely come from? And then third, how can we potentially fix some of these cadence issues? Yeah. So the most common is the telecine or the 3-2 pull-down idea, which is it started out as a way of converting 24 frame-per-second film into 29.9 frame per second or 59.9 interlaced field per second video. This is your newsreels. This is stuff that was a film that was converted to video before we had HD 24 frame a second video available. What it is is it takes like frame.

Now, nobody jumped down my throat if I get these numbers wrong. I'm going from memory here. It's like the A, then the B, and then C is split into two fields. D is split in the two fields. And then we go to the fifth frame. So it's a five frame. And there's other, there's other cadences that are possible too, by the way. Yeah, there was what's called the advanced pulldown, which is very rarely used, but you do encounter it sometimes.

Yeah, yeah. The point is, when you see three frames and then two fielded frames and then three more frames, right, you know that's a pulldown. Now, if you're working in a 2997 timeline, you might be okay to just keep that as is. However, if you're working in a 24 frame of a second show, which in most cases we are now, you actually want to remove that pulldown. And what's going to happen is most, most A&LEs can do this. Resolve can do it. You do it in clip attributes just by telling the clip that it is a pulled down thing. So it takes a 2997 clip and derives a 2398 clip from it.

The key thing here is it needs to know where the start of that cadence is. Some tools can automatically detect it. After Effects does a very good job doing that. Resolve doesn't automatically detect it. So you kind of go through and you tell it, A, B, C, or D. and each time you've got to look at that source, go frame by frame. One, two, three, four, five. Now, let's talk about some weird situations here,

because this is where I get real passionate about this because I see it done wrong so many times. Let's say you have a pull-down applied, then somebody has converted it to progressive, so the interlaced fields are gone, and you end up with three frames of motion, two frames of like a hung frame, like a freeze frame, three frames of motion, two frames of a freeze frame. You can't just remove

the pull down because now the algorithm that takes those interlaced fields and puts them back together won't work. So what do you do? You got to get rid of those repeated frames. Now it gets even worse when somebody in edit, for example, has gone in and said, oh wait, this is a 2997 clip. We're working at 2398. I'm going to time squeeze it and rescale the time. So now you have repeated frames that have now been time warped. You might end up like, okay, four frames. than a freeze, four frames than a freeze. So go frame by frame by frame, and here's where you gotta use some of the tools

at your disposal to manually do this. This is one of the things that I do probably the most when fixing weird motion conversions and archival sources. I think a lot of people don't realize you can do, and a lot of people don't bother taking the time to do. But most of these shots are not very long. We're not talking about an hour long clip here.

We're talking about maybe a two second shot in a sequence, right? So I go through left, right, right, right, right, until I get a repeated frame, then mark it in and out, extract that repeated frame and keep that process going. So essentially, I'm shortening that clip to shorter than we need it, but I am taking every discrete moment in time and putting them one after the other after the other. What does that get me? It gets me something that I can then nest into a compound clip. Again, the duration is going to be shorter than I need it to be, but render that in. place now I have now that I have all of the actual frames intact with no repeats no ghosts no

anything else but you you've closed the gap though that where the removal of the frames were yes yes I've closed the gap on each of those so essentially if you play it back it'll look like the motion will be intact but it'll be too fast guess what render that down optical flow it back to the right time now you have frames yeah beautiful smooth motion that doesn't have jitters, doesn't have shakes, and this can work with any cadence, essentially, because once a time effect has been baked into the source you have, you don't have the option of automatically fixing it. You got to go in frame by frame. By the way, this was a funny little solve. I had an issue like this the other day where I was, there was a

dissolve between two different archival sources with different cadences. So I had fixed each, but the last frame in the first one, or the last couple frames and the first couple frames of the next one, it looked like a jump because it was like, I don't know how to describe it, but it looked like a jump. The new smooth cut, by the way, has optical flow options in it. So you can actually invent that frame, like it invented a frame to smooth that over even more, which was great.

Now, let me ask you one more quick, because you brought up something I'm curious about. So why should I have to remove, like, Why should I have to remove duplicated frames? Like it feels like it's so fast anyway. Is anybody going to notice it, right? Like, why do I have to go through all this pain in the ass work? You know, if the shot's not moving and nobody's happening and there's no action, maybe you don't. But most times that's not the case.

Sometimes you ever just watch, and this is one of those pet peeves of mine that I've seen in really expensive documentaries where I watch somebody walking across the screen in an archival clip and it's like, walk, walk, walk, walk, walk, walk, walk, walk, walk, walk, pause. And the problem isn't one instance of that repeated frame or that jitter frame. The problem is, in almost all cases, it happens at a regular interval. And that's when the viewer starts to pick up on it, right? And they don't know, oh, somebody took a three, two, pull down, baked it down, and then re-timed it and premier. They're not, nobody's not watching a show thinking that, except for me.

But I It looks it looks cheap Yeah I also put it out there that I also put it out there that most Most reputable QC these days will flag repeated frames Especially on digital platforms if you're releasing on you know an Amazon or Apple TV or whatever They're not going to stand for repeated frames at all But it's one of those things it's so easy in most case to say inherent to source which right don't get me wrong Inherent to source is a powerful weapon to use.

when you're trying to get a show done, and some things are inherent to source, and we can't fix everything. Right? This is one of those things that, at first glance, it might look like, oh, it's just baked in there. There's nothing I can do. There's something you can do.

Support for this episode comes from Flanders Scientific and their DM series HD monitors. From set to post to broadcast, these versatile HD monitors are equipped with an industry-leading array of features and capabilities, making them an indispensable tool to DITs, engineers, editors, and colors. Learn more at Flanderscientific.com. One thing I see all the time with film originated sources is, well, actually, there's two or three things here.

Number one is weird, let's just call it, you know, color layer shifting or, you know, sort of problems with it where you might get, oh, why is this so pink and red, or why is this, you know, green or whatever, right? That's number one. Number two is I often see optical problems where, like, somebody might be ghosted. And you're like, why am I seeing like a silhouette of somebody's face, right? Like kind of next. It almost looks like a halo around them.

You kind of see that from a lot of archival sources. And then the third one that I think is worth noting is, what do we do when things in the film frame, because we didn't dress this one yet, but, the actual frame moves, right? Like severe gate weave or rolling issues where the actual things move. How do we attach those? Now, I'm curious about all your thoughts about that. I want to ask my, sort of give my opinion on the first one with sort of these color imbalance

issues that sometimes pop up with different, you know, different layers, whatever. Now, this could be a couple of different reasons for this. It could have been the original film process, right, and just different layers aging at different rates and when somebody scanned it, they didn't clean it up, right? It could also just be a transcoding problem that you don't know at that point, right? So my general take with film sources that have color problems is wide end of the funnel to small end of the funnel, right? I'm starting generally with something like offset and printer points, right?

Before I even do any sort of transform into my working space just to kind of get that more or balanced out for the transform. And sometimes you'll be surprised how heavy those moves are with like an offset, right? Like you're just like, oh my God, I've never moved this wheel this far in my life. Completely normal as far as I'm concerned. You have anything else to add to that? I mean, I'm sure you have some sort of take on this big color. That's actually a really, really good point about adjusting before your working space transform.

Because, you know, the selling point, if you will, of just about every color management system out there, They will tell you that you can make all of your adjustments in your working space. And for non-broken sources, that's totally true. Guess what? We're dealing with broken sources. Let's say you have a film scan that was tagged incorrectly, so it's full range levels as opposed to video levels. You're not going to fix that in your working space.

Fix that before you do the input transform, because guess what? The input transform is expecting a certain, image, right? So, in those cases where you have drastic color imbalances or drastic channel imbalances because different layers of film of age differently, go to the channel mixer. Balance that stuff out in channel mixer or like you said, offset, or even traditional color management or sorry, traditional color correction tools, because, and I firmly believe that it's a good thing to do this before your input transform, because essentially what you're doing

is you're sanitizing the source for the input transform, because that's a good thing. that input transform is expecting what you're saying it is, and what your source is, is not exactly what you're saying. Yeah, and this is going to protect you. I mean, you see it all the time. People are like, oh, I got these little, like, green specs or black spots or whatever. Like, these are oftentimes things like negative values that are created from, uh, from, from a, from a mathematical transform when you're into your working space. Like, there's a whole, I agree with you that I'm not, this whole idea that like, if you're going outside of your working space, you're doing it wrong doesn't really play well with me because like, if you think about, I mean, even if you think back back when, when our pipelines were more lutt heavy than they are now, we still kind of put that Lut in the middle, right? Like, it was still like, okay, I'm going to do some image prep and massaging before the Lut, then I'm going to do some things after. And like, I still think that holds.

And we see that all the time. Like, where we often see it is, as we'll talk to you about next, is in video footage that's really overexposed and burnt out, right? You get weirdness if you try to do that adjustment in your work. space sometimes and you can just go right before that normal YRGB yeah I'm just going to gain that down okay my I'm not blown out and then when you hit the transform all those hunky dory yeah you need to when when you have kind of sources that you don't that you can't vouch for if you will yeah and you can usually see this on your scope so you can see it in the image it is I think absolutely critical

to sanitize that source before it hits your input transform because like we've always said that input transform is expecting something real. There's no one size fits all input transform, right? So it's whether it's expecting SRGB, whether it's expecting 709, whether it's expecting Cineon film, right? You need to give the input transform what it's actually expecting if you expect a good result. Yeah. So that optical issue that I spoke about with films sometimes where you see ghosting, I had the hardest time a few years ago with a, we were doing a, film about the Korean War. And so it was all of this like a soldier originated for the most part, like eight millimeter

pocket cam kind of stuff, you know, in the 1950s. Who knows how that was processed? Who knows how I was scanned? And oftentimes, you know, you'd have a tank or an airplane or a person's face. And there was just like, just like, just think about it almost like that analog, that ghost scene that you, you know, you saw sometimes in like bad TV, right, where like you kind of have like a separation of the image. probably not that it's probably more of an optical issue about how it was originally scanned into into video

how would you go about fixing something like that because i've had you know obviously various levels of you know cloning or masking or sharpening or desharpening can kind of sometimes relieve that but is there is there some approach that you have that when you you go to first when you have that kind of situation that's one of those things where it is unfortunately in most cases. And granted, this is going to change image to image, but that is one of those things where I think it is kind of inherent to source. And this is a judgment call you've got to make when you're evaluating these sources. Is the fix more damage than the original problem? If we get into trying to, let's say there is some ghosting. If we get into trying to cut out that main subject and

de-ghost it by like repositioning it, then you get like, oh, we're going to put a halo in it. and there's going to be weird tracking issues, and we're going to have to do a bunch of rotoscoping. At that point, you're faking it so hard that I think, just like if we try to make the color adjustment further than what the image will allow, if we try to fix things further than what the source will allow, sometimes we do more harm than good, and that's a judgment call. You've got to make image per image. Yeah, I agree. And I mean, that's the situation where you go back and say, hey, is there another scan of this available or is there another source of this available? I will say in a pinch, though, for this particular thing. And I'll put some examples if I can find them up in the show notes for this episode.

A Luma-only key can actually do wonders with this kind of thing, where you do a little bit of a harder edge than you would for normal color correction, right? You're really kind of trying to mask it off pretty well. And then just deepening or, you know, bringing down midtones and shadows in that key layer can sometimes get rid of that kind of, because it's generally, it's generally, somewhere having to do with kind of the light from, you know, yeah, high contrast edges where,

you know, the light's coming through the frame of film. Maybe it wasn't flat or something, whatever the cause may be. Sometimes you can fix that with just a key and just bringing down that a little bit to lessen that halo. Yeah. And the secret there is,

you know, yes, you're adding contrast to do that. Sometimes maybe there's lots of noise or issues in the highlights or in the deep shadows and it's worth it just to kind of cut those off. but then guess what, you might end up with a higher contrast than your actual grade once. Well, decontrast it after you've kind of chopped that data out. If that data is bad data, right?

If there's like a bunch of grease or grime in the deep shadows, you can like do a log adjustment, for example. Bring that down and then actually clip it there. Use the hard clip tools and then readjust the contrast back to where it fits in your grade. Now, granted, there won't be any detail anymore there. It'll just be kind of gray, but you will have achieved your grades, you know, wanted contrast ratio and removed the objectionable data, the noise or the grime at the same time. Yeah. And then related, the last thing I would talk about is is gate weave and extreme cases of gate weave, right? And more like rolling, right?

So when it comes to gateweb and kind of like that wobble that you might get as, you know, the film's moving through the scanner, there's plenty of restoration tools. that will kind of fix that for you. I'm more in the situation where I often find, like, you'll get, like, in middle of the shot, just like a two-frame jump up and then it comes back down, right? And I think in those situations, there's a couple ways of handling it. Number one is making cuts and just physically repositioning

and kind of, like, one of the things I'll often do is I will take, like, the frame before and the frame after where that jump is. I'll make the cut, right? And then I'll kind of, like, use a difference mode, of that section that jumps up and kind of move it back down and then kind of go left arrow right arrow, left arrow, right arrow,

just to kind of see that it lines up, right? Which is really helpful. In cases where it's not super severe that jump, you'd actually be surprised how well stabilization can work in those kind of things. I would just say I have found that the simplest stabilization, the translation option, often works best for that kind of just like that gateweed,

because you start getting, especially in perspective, you'll start, it will start warping things a little bit, which is a telltale sign of bad, a bad synchronism. Yeah, when it comes to stabilization and film sources, the warnings I will give you is that things like film grain and noise will trick the stabilization. Totally. Foreground objects and actual camera motion that you might not want to stabilize will trick the stabilization. So what does this mean? Jump into something like fusion or even the match moves. effect or the open effects tracker, the FX tracker that you mentioned earlier, and find a single point at the background of the image or a single point. If you're lucky enough to have the full

gate, find a single point around the perimeter of the edge of the film. Single point X, Y tracks are great tools for fixing film movement issues versus actually the captured camera, because you've got to think about those two things separately, right? You might not want to stabilize the actual shot. You just want to stabilize out the motion of the film. Hi, Joey. Good stuff here, man. But I do want to draw a line in the sand here.

We've talked a lot about, you know, sort of general archival and working with film archival sources. But what about the video side of things? I'm thinking about things like interlacing and blanking. Well, instead of making this a two-hour episode, what do you say we come back in a part two and we'll talk about more video-centric or video-specific issues instead of making this one long episode. Just as a quick reminder, you can always check out show notes, as we've mentioned before, at the offsetpodcast.com. You can follow us on social media on both Facebook and Instagram by searching for the Offset Podcast. And if you wouldn't mind, you can check out this link right here to buy us a cup of virtual coffee.

Any support that you're able to give the show goes directly into helping us out with costs associated with our editor and hosting. and all that kind of stuff. So we really support any, we really appreciate any support that you can give. Joey, good stuff here as always. And I'm excited for part two where we'll dive into more of the video specific stuff. So for the old Offset podcast, I'm Robbie Kahnman. And I'm Joey Deanna. Thanks for listening.