Restoration or Reconstruction?
Have you ever looked at an old photo or video and thought, “something doesn’t look quite right, but I don’t know what?” We can help you figure out what’s happened and provide options for restoration or reconstruction (or maybe both). Although the end goal – a better digital picture or video - is the same, these are two very different categories of work, and it’s good to know the difference. So, what are the differences?
Restoration involves fixing something that is already there. For photos, restoration services could be:
Fixing small tears and scratches.
Adjusting colors for faded photos.
Sharpening existing photos or adding contrast.
Reconstruction involves adding something that wasn’t there before or replacing something that has been completely removed. For photos, reconstruction services would look like:
Fixing major damage, like fixing a photo of someone with half their face missing because of a water stain.
Adding color to black and white photos. As scientifically accurate as grayscale reading can be, we still consider it a reconstruction.
Adding details that weren’t there before or removing details that were. This includes removing objects and adding people into family portraits.
For VHS tapes, the quality of the videos we can extract and restore are affected by the age of the tape, the quality of the tape, and the conditions in which the tapes were stored. The biggest challenge in VHS restoration is that VHS tapes are very fragile. Audio and video are both stored as magnetic markings on a piece of film, and once they’re gone, they’re lost forever.
VHS restoration usually involves changing the tracking feature on a VCR, then running the tape multiple times to capture the best combinations of audio and video output. We can also adjust filters and make some overall color changes while still in restoration mode. Anything beyond that runs into the reconstruction category.
From a reconstruction perspective, we can usually make very accurate inferences based on information from other frames to rebuild your video. While this is a very time- and labor-intensive process, it is typically the best (and only) option to bring damaged videos back to life.