Project description
Innovative scanner to digitise historical films
Advances in digital technology have helped to preserve our cultural heritage. But there’s still a lot to be done. Vast collections of historical films still need to be digitised. Despite the economic growth of 8 % per year and over EUR 400 million in estimated value, digitalisation faces challenges. Firstly, there’s a lack of professional upscaled film scanners on the market and a lack of knowledge of historical films among service providers. The EU-funded VeCoScan project will develop and test a multispectral, versatile scanning unit designed to adjust to the specific film type to scan and able to properly digitise the whole range of film colours. The project will offer evidence of film stocks’ physical properties and models for colour reconstruction according to scientific standards.
Objective
Film archives contain large and diverse collections of historical films. In order to exhibit and exploit these collections
commercially, archives need to digitize their holdings. With more than 400 Mio. € per year globally and growth rates of 8 %
annually, the digitization of analog film material is an exponentially growing market.
However, as a study by the research team has shown, there is no professional high-end film scanner on the market that is
able to digitize the whole range of these films.
The PoC VeCoScan tackles this lack of technical solutions by developing and testing a multi-spectral and versatile core film
scanner unit. This versatile design will allow the film scanner to adapt the spectral distribution and the directional
arrangement of its illumination system, based on colorimetric measurements of film stocks executed by the research team.
The higher image quality of the raw scans will achieve better results in terms of both the accuracy with the original colors
and the potential to digitally reconstruct faded colors that concern an estimated 90% of chromogenic film stocks up to 1980.
The most important bottleneck in digitization workflows is the optical set-up of the scanners. The second bottleneck is a
lack of knowledge of historical films on the part of most service providers. The PoC will address both of these current
drawbacks: by improving the scanner, and by delivering a comprehensive package that includes information about the film
stocks’ physical properties and models for color reconstruction, in line with high scientific standards. As a result, scanning
and post-processing times will be greatly reduced and workflows will become much more cost-efficient. Furthermore, an
accurate digital rendition of analog films is crucial for the long-term sustainability of digital representation.
Fields of science
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
ERC-POC - Proof of Concept GrantHost institution
8006 Zurich
Switzerland