AntcuFaalb said:
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In conclusion, it's not just about pushing buttons and waiting for progress bars to finish. The team has to painstakingly examine and restore each and every one of the ~175,000 frames in Star Wars.
If you want to better understand what's involved in digital film restoration, then please PM me and I'll hook you up with everything you need to try it out first-hand.
First, thanks for stepping up to explain this.
If I understand correctly, the answer to my question is that
1) there are 1-3 people on the team,
2) each person is only working on it occasionally, not several hours per day or even every day.
re: "In conclusion" No one said anything about "pushing buttons and waiting for progress bars to finish" and I certainly didn't mean to suggest that any of this was easy work. My question was why this "team" was taking so long.
I understand what is involved with digital film restoration.I have been in a position where I worked daily with digital film restoration people, and I trained (briefly) in visual effects at Technicolor. Among other things, I have rotoscoped, removed wires from special effects shots, and fixed still photos in my career.
The restoration guys I knew used software that allowed quick comparison of small areas of the frame to the previous and next frames, going several forward or back as necessary. This allowed quick replacement and blending of repaired areas. They would do thousands of tiny fixes in an 8 hour day. I'm afraid I don't know the name of the software and for all I know it could have been proprietary.
So my frame of reference is a team (2 guys working 8 hours per day) cranking out MANY cleaned frames daily, thousands of fixes. When "Team -1" says something takes weeks, i keep picturing a process similar to the one I know, but you're saying that's clearly not the case.
One person manually fixing each frame sounds like a nightmare, but it's not necessarily a "few seconds of footage every week" kind of nightmare unless you're only spending a little time on it every week. That definitely explains why it's taking years.