There was a way to save the documentary footage

Plastic films have ingredients made from gelatine and silver halide, with optimal light-emitting. But gelatine is easy to decompose over time. Therefore, original movies are always kept very carefully.

Film warehouses of Czechoslovakia or Sweden are often built on mountains far from the city center, and are hidden deep into the ground up to 30 meters, always reaching a temperature of -50. According to the Swedish expert, with such storage standards, a new plastic film can be kept for 500 years.

In Vietnam, under current conditions, each of our films is only preserved for about 50 years.

Vietnam Film Institute was established in 1979, is a place to collect, store and handle incidents of images of films of various genres, many of which are not widely published. In 1997, the technical department was born with the main function of dealing with film problems such as mold, scratch, dust . for documentary, documentary and feature films.

Initially, with rudimentary equipment, mainly to do manually, the process is complicated and time consuming but the efficiency is not high. Later invested more modern machines, but there are no suitable software for this job. In the world, there are also research groups of countries with developed cinema (UK, USA .) that are experimenting but have not officially released finished products even though there are already demo products at Vietnam.

Film footage before and after processing.Document photos .

Looking at the precious movies that are getting old over time, Mr. Dinh Van Hung, head of the technical department, can't help but be sorry. He always wondered how to "save" the film. After many studies and experiments, in 2003 he first found a relatively suitable solution.

The films were moldy, dusty, scratched during use, or after many projections, the gear grooves were worn out, the film rolls unevenly, causing the phenomenon of shaking . to be transferred to computer drive. Animations are converted into each photo and the technician will process them on each photo. It sounds simple, because photoshop software can edit photos as you like. But this is a documentary, so when processing, you must absolutely respect the original image, you cannot abuse the technique to adjust the light, sharpness . wrongly order the context and atmosphere of the material . Sang, a very young technician, shared: "There are movies when they are processed, although they have reviewed them many times but not every time I have tears in their eyes, these are the documents recorded during the time. historical points of the nation or even images in the US imperial prison . '

Mr. Hung said, the technical department has molded, cleaned, scratched and shaken the three films that are valuable: "Uncle Ho in Viet Bac", "Lakeside Village" and "Independence Day". The film after technical processing has almost kept the original quality. Following the success, the people at the Film Institute are planning to process documentary films about Thang Long - Hanoi thousand years of age to timely bring to the people of the country the images recorded by the past days of Capital.