A 40-year-old shoebox reel is flickering, scratched, grainy and faded. Watch it become clean, smooth and color-graded, then learn exactly how, one stage at a time, with an interactive page for every step.
Muted autoplay, unmute any player for sound.
Home-movie film from the 60s-80s has a consistent set of ailments. The restoration is a sequence of stages, each curing one.
Gate weave + handheld shake jitter the frame a few pixels every frame.
Exposure pulses several times a second, flicker.
Dust flashes for a single frame; long vertical scratches run down the film.
Silver-crystal grain crawls like noise when blown up to HD.
Dyes decay unevenly; blacks go milky, color drifts to muddy orange/green.
~18 fps looks stuttery to eyes used to 30-60 fps.
Order matters enormously, fix them in the wrong sequence and some cures undo others. Click any stage for its own page: the idea, an interactive visualization, the real technique, and the exact dials we chose.
All ten stages are live, start at 01 · Stabilize or jump straight to any step.
The reel is cut into 261 shots first. Color and light are measured per shot so a bright outdoor scene never gets averaged with a dark indoor one, and the correction stays constant within a shot, so nothing flickers.
Every stage saves a mathematically lossless intermediate, frames stream one at a time so memory stays flat, and a manifest resumes from the last finished shot after a crash.