The Fanmade DVD is coming back!

As I mentioned in a reply to the Fanmade DVD topic I created almost 4 years ago to the day... it's back on!

To sum up what I said in the last post, there were a lot of things going on in my life, and the idea of doing a frame by frame restoration on a film was a bit much to handle in the midst of having a busy videography/photography job. But, after a long bit of research, I discovered a way to restore the film without having to do a literal manual frame by frame restoration! The program does most of the restoration work for me, but I would go through to ensure that any "stragler" bits of print damage were removed, as well as rectify any glitches that would follow the auto restoration.

Basically, the program uses algorithims to detect any elements that appear in one frame, but not in the surrounding frames. In short, print damage. However, this is a double edged sword. When dealing with scenes with fast motion (and lord knows, martial arts films have plenty of those!), some elements that *should* be there could disappear... like arms and legs! Also, whenever there is a hard cut, and print damage appears on the first and/or last frame of that shot, since there's no prior frame to assist restoring that first frame of the shot or no subsequent frame to assist restoring that last frame of the shot, those frames will remain unrestored. So manual restoration will still be required for some frames... just not ALL of them!

And on that note, I present the first "restoration demo" of the film:

http://youtu.be/42X6lACQLI8?hd=1

It's a first pass, and still has some print damage in those first/last frames of each shot as mentioned above, but I think it's a start! Also, make sure to watch it in HD (1080p!) and full screen to really pick up the differences. YouTube doesn't quite do it justice unless you watch it that way!