Retrospective

You can skip directly to the article and skip past the Retrospective, if you want.

Back in April 2005, I wrote the article (that you're about to read), which showed examples of a Spatial Noise Reduction system that was messing up old cartoons by blurring the lines around moving objects, and explained why this was happening.

This problem, usually termed "DVNR" (after the name of the system causing the artefact) by animation fans, had been written about before. Animation legend John Kricfalusi, creator of Ren & Stimpy, first brought it to our attention on the now-defunct Spumco.com web site. Amid Amidi then wrote an article in the late 90s for Animation World Magazine, which used some of the same material.

My article had a much greater effect than I'd expected. It was soon linked to by animation sites and then spread around the web. In May 2005, a Wall Street Journal reporter contacted me and arranged a phone interview to help with creating a news report on the problem. Now, almost exactly two years on, DVNR artefacts in animation are a much more widely known problem. Warner Bros, who were especially singled out for the problems on the Looney Tunes box sets (which I think says a lot about how much people care about this classic material, rather than any distrust of WB), internally distributed an e-mail entitled "MORE DVNR FALLOUT", linking to the article, so it's safe to say that they took it seriously.

For the record, I need to clarify my stance on this. As with any sort of video modifying system, I'm not totally against the use of Dust and Scratch Removal (what we call "DVNR" in this article). I'm against it being used when it becomes detrimental. I think that any sort of video processing should never be used unless a complete perfectionist is there to review the results and check that it's not doing any sort of damage.

Anyway, whether it's the result of this article, Wall Street's involvement, people complaining, or a combination of these and other factors, I think we can safely say that whilst DVNR errors in animation haven't been completely obliterated, the quality of stuff we get now is a hell of a lot better than what we did back in May 2005. So if you wrote a letter to any of the companies responsible voicing your distrust of the system, then well done to you. And if you actually work for the companies, and you're reading this, then thanks for taking our complaint seriously!

Introduction

The move from VHS to DVD, which has made advances in video technology such as Progressive Scan, Component Video, as well as ultra-crisp flat panel LCD and Plasma displays widespead, means that consumers demand better quality, crisper video pictures than ever before. Old animation, sometimes material thought lost forever, is dug out of archives and reintegrated with existing material for the purpose of Collectors' Editions.

Of course, these old cartoons, which of course are on film reels, aren't always in the most fantastic state, meaning they'll have visible scratches and dirt. To add further hassle, certain foolish review sites (of which there are many in the DVD world) often complain that releases of such aging material don't have quality comparable to the slick, clean look of today's digitally produced animation - "it's too grainy". "There's too much dirt". "These cartoons look a bit too old." Of course these cartoons look old. It's because they ARE old!

Such comments seem to run off the belief that today's modern video processing technology can instantly fix any sort of blemish seen to be undesirable by the human eye. Wrong! Defects like these are hard and expensive to correct! The best results come each time from restorations done to animated films by people, not computers.

In the most painstaking cases, a team of experts will carefully inspect each frame of film and remove defects mainly by hand. It goes without saying that this is not only time-consuming, but extremely expensive, and that very few companies can afford to give their material this first-class treatment.

So, what other solution is there? Automatic DVNR - which stands for Digital Video Noise Reduction, what this article is about. This dirt and scratch removal system is quite often used. It can give great results, and I can understand why studios would want to use it. The problem lies in the fact that the studios just aren't careful enough. As with any automated computer system that modifies video content, it needs to be used with extreme caution. The results of overdone DVNR - essentially, companies expecting a computer to correct problems by itself - are often disastrous, not to mention depressing for hardcore fans of classic animation - in other words, the people who the material was aimed at in the first place.

You see, although it does comparatively little to harm live action footage, things go a little pear-shaped when animated content is DVNR'ed. The scratch removal routine does exactly what it's supposed to and sets to work removing thin black lines from the picture. Of course, being a computer, the system can't tell the difference between different types of these said black lines. So, often, the thin black pieces of dirt on the film and the thin black outlines on character drawings (which are obviously supposed to be there) are read by the computer as one entity and are obliterated from the image.

Go forward to the next page to see some illustrated examples of this process going wrong. You can click many of the smaller pictures you see to load a full-size graphic.

Next Page: Looney Tunes Gold Collection Vol.2 >>

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