animation solution(s) for old documentary footage

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animation solution(s) for old documentary footage

Post by novatocarlos » March 26th, 2010, 2:00 pm

For you forward thinkers/animators out there, I'm producing a documentary on a boxer who was active in the 1970s and 1980s. One of the great challenges in producing historical biographies from those eras is that a lot of the video footage has degenerated and the image has been compromised.

Does anyone know of a way to "animate" an established (albeit degenerated) video image, thereby creating a hybrid that can effectively and clearly convey the action in the original motion picture?

My aim is to provide a "cleaner," more watchable image during the vintage fight sequences. Any ideas/direction are much appreciated. Thanks.

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Post by Ben » March 26th, 2010, 6:57 pm

My only initial thought is that you could rotoscope over the original footage, which would give you very clean lines that could be colored so that you have the exact same movement, but super-clear. You'd lose the immediacy and impact of the original live action, and it would take forever if you had a lot of footage to "convert", but you *could* then mix/merge it with the original footage in some kind of overlay to make up a hybrid that would be clearer but retain the "vintage" feel. At the end of the day, you might want to think about sucking the color out completely, to prevent color bleed on the original footage, or maybe go for a specifically "grungy" look to at least suggest the vintage look was intentional.

Hope that helps a little. I'm sure others here might have much better advice. :)

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Post by novatocarlos » March 26th, 2010, 7:16 pm

Sounds interesting. Can you please give me some idea of scope when you say a lot of footage would take forever? My idea was to use this approach to really highlight subtle but key actions in a prize fight, so I wouldn't be going on for long periods of time. Sounds expensive. Any idea of cost on a per second basis? Also, do you know of any documentaries that have used the aforementioned technique? Thanks!

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Post by Ben » March 30th, 2010, 5:53 am

Take a look at Waking Life and A Scanner Darkly.

Not suggesting you'd go mad and go the whole hog as they have, but with a frame capture device, you should be able to find a program that will allow you to "trace" over the lines in the original footage you need to emphasize to provide a clean rotoscoped version that you can then layer in/over the footage to clear it up a bit.

Can't name any documentaries that might have used this, but I have seen it and plenty of them use various animation techniques to illustrate material that they have no other visual representation for.

On cost, all you need is to be able to capture the footage (assuming it's already transferred to a video format) and something to "draw over" it with. I'm sure Photoshop would work (then export the frames out as animation to your editing software), but as for real cost it would be down to the amount of frames you needed to convert.

Basically, you're tracing the fighters in the frame, so however long it takes you to trace one frame, multiply that by 24 to get the number of frames per second, and then that by the number of seconds you want to clean up. It's not quick and easy work, but it will get you results and does work.

They MAY be a solution that auto-finds the lines for you and does a basic auto-rotoscope process, but I haven't been involved with anything like that for a few years now and wouldn't know if they were any good. I'd imaging though, that if something like that existed, it would have a tough time coping with vintage footage and would probably mix lines and get confused.

Personally, hand "tracing" is the way to go, and guaranteed to get solid, smooth results, though give a few seconds a go to see if it's something you can seriously be patient enough to do and will give you the results you want.

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