Pixel Storm Post
Services

Film restoration

Bringing archived films back to life: clean, stable, and true to how they were meant to be seen.

Restoring original negative stock is one of the most demanding jobs in post-production. A decades-old negative is not a picture yet. It is a dense, orange-masked latent image whose dyes have drifted and faded unevenly over time, carrying every scratch and speck the years have left behind.

The negative

Colour and density recovery

  • True C-41 inversion from the original orange-masked negative
  • Colour and density rebuilt from first principles
  • Age-related casts and channel imbalances corrected
  • Faithful to the filmmaker's intended look
  • Delicate highlight and shadow detail preserved
The damage

Physical wear and tear

  • Dust, embedded dirt and splice marks
  • Vertical tramline scratches from projection and transport
  • Gate weave and wobble from worn sprockets
  • Repaired without smearing across real image detail
  • Clean edges around moving limbs and objects

The hard part is never finding the defects. It is repairing them without harming the picture. Most tools smear or blob at the edges of moving objects because they cannot tell a scratch from real image detail crossing an occlusion boundary. Ours can.

Before & after

From negative to restored

Drag each slider to reveal the true C-41 inversion and colour reconstruction, straight off the original negative stock.

Restored
Original negative
Original negative Restored
Restored
Negative
Negative Restored
Restored
Negative
Negative Restored
Our software

The Film Negative Restoration Suite

A decade of restoration work, built into our own tools. Each one solves a specific defect and leaves the rest of the frame alone, so the result looks genuinely restored, not scrubbed or over-processed.

The Pixel Storm Film Restoration Suite in action: a restored frame beside its node tree of Weave, Film Neg, balance and noise-reduction tools

Film Neg Restore

True C-41 negative inversion with GPU-accelerated colour reconstruction, giving a clean, accurately graded starting point rather than a rough approximation.

Weave Restore

Corrects the weave and wobble introduced as the stock moves through the scanner sprocket, locking every frame rock-steady.

Dust and Scratches

Repairs dust, dirt and scratches along motion vectors that follow the action, protecting moving limbs and objects from the smearing and break-up that lesser tools leave behind.

Frame Steal

Patches damaged or missing areas with clean, motion-matched detail borrowed from neighbouring frames.

In-paint

Reconstructs areas with no clean source, filling holes and heavy damage with plausible, motion-aware detail so nothing is left blank or smeared.

Tramline

Targets persistent tramlines, the long vertical scratches that run unbroken across many frames, and clears them while leaving the surrounding picture untouched.

Have a film to save?

Tell us about the elements and their condition. We will assess and advise.

Enquire about restoration