A Film in a Frame: Movie Barcodes for Film Restoration

Today, color reproduction techniques are among the most studied and fascinating topic in cinema studies and film restoration. In this study, we propose the use of a tool called movie barcode in order to represent the chromatic variation of a whole film in a single image. The movie barcode is a graph where all the colors used in each film frame are extracted and represented in succession, allowing to synthesize in a single image the chromatic variations throughout the film. The study and analysis of the movie barcodes allowed us to extract movies chromatic mood board and make comparisons among different videos. The potential of this method has been initially tested on animated films with simple color compositions and next on digitized analog films. This application let us to evaluate the effectiveness of movie barcodes to represent and study films of cultural and historical interest before and after the process of restoration.