UNESCO estimates that some 2.2 billion meters of nitrate-based film are currently stored at national and international film archives. These films are subject to continual chemical decomposition and have often suffered from improper treatment during their screening lives. Considering that they are records of our common history and culture, they need to be restored to make them viewable once more.

Traditional analogue film restoration focuses on applying photochemical techniques which hinder further decay but can not remove most of the defects. DIAMANT goes beyond photochemical restoration to provide an innovative and complete digital manipulation and correction system.

DIAMANT provides a multitude of digital restoration algorithms such as dust removal, motion stabilisation and flicker that have previously been unavailable for film restoration. The challenges of terabyte data volumes and huge compute requirements have been overcome by advancing the state of the art in commercial off-the-shelf computation clusters and interconnect hardware. Just as importantly, DIAMANT also supports the whole process of digital film restoration by using a novel approach to navigation and viewing, integrating film scanners and video recorders, as well as providing tools for indexing, navigating, and even predicting how long it will take to restore terabytes of digitised film. All this technology developed is not only used in the film restoration system but is available as an open framework for the development of film manipulation applications to other software developing companies.

DIAMANT is now a ground-breaking product in the marketplace of digital film restoration, and has already been used for the restoration of the cult film Metropolis, the classic TV detective series Derrick, and a recently discovered print of an early John Ford Western.

Result
DIAMANT Suite: the semiautomatic digital film restoration system
DIAMANT System: the versatile platform to build digital film manipulation applications
DIAMANT Task Scheduler and Launcher
DIAMANT interconnect: A high-performance IP over SCI driver for Dolphins last generation SCI-cards