I recently began a project of pulling the cartoons off my DVDs and restoring them to their original film frame rates of 24 fps. When I mentioned this in the shoutbox yesterday, I was shot down and told I was basically an idiot for not undertsanding how the "NTSC" format works. Nothing could be further from the truth as I have done extensive research on the subject, not to mention having over a decade experience working with film. The fact of the matter is, these cartoons WERE shot on film and THEN transferred to the NTSC format. I've created a web page explaining the process with both example pictures and two short video demonstrations.

G1 Cartoon Film Restoration Project Explained

To sum up what's going on there, you'll notice the end result in the video demontrations is a MUCH superior version of the cartoon when it is processed back into its original film format. Take a look and see for yourself.

Just want to add that Windows Media Player does an excellent job of on-the-fly frame interpretation, so you may not notice much of a difference between the two examples. The corrected file, however, has the advantage of being universally correct in any media player, and has less frames to compress for file viewing. If you try using the VLC media player for example, the difference is much easier noticed.

wow that's interesting. do you plan on doing every episode? Once done what do you plan on doing with your new hotness?

Too bad the cartoon wasn't animated at 24 fps but it does look nice (DVDs suck)

you've prompted the same argument that made me claw my eyes out yesterday

I'm sorry, did I say something?

I only meant that the animators didn't draw 24 separate frames of animation per second... otherwise the animation wouldn't be so jerky. Compare Transformers to (say) Steamboat Willie or anything like that and you'll see what I mean.

I'd just like to mention...these were likely mastered to some sort of NTSC videotape (1" reels, if I recall from the special features), meaning that the video, at the least, is 29.97 fps and always has been. So its not so much a restoration as it is an enhancement.

That is cool.

The inverse telecine process is be definition a restoration, so its not an enchancement. I'm restoring the original animation frames back to their 24fps format. You have to read my web page that explains all this and about the process of converting the film to the NTSC format for telelvision viewing. I'm reversing that process, thus, restoring the animation back to its original film form.




Why is it so hard for people to understand that YES, these cartoons WERE drawn at 24fps? Hell it even describes this on the friggin DVD extras! Shall I upload a video of that?

A question... how do you know that the masters were film and not video?

I understand. Its just that, typically of shows this age, you won't find any sort of film master. I'd be surprised as hell if any kind of film cutting went on whatsoever. I'd figure they'd telecine it, cut it on videotape, and thus produce a Betacam or one-inch "master."

I admire the work you're doing, so please don't take it as a slam...

Setting aside common sense that the inverse telecine process just "happens" to work perfectly when done on these cartoons, the fact that these cartoons were done on film first is quite well documented on the DVD extras in the Chinese box set I have. They even show some blooper frames where you can see the Japanese animator's hand trying to place the next cell, as well as several test frames with the classic scene take marker. They also claim that they were able to directly telecine most of the master film footage, but that some of the episodes have the 1" beta tape footage filling in unrecovered spots. You can tell when this happens because the picture goes from a vibrant film quality to a blurry video tape quality.

Lastly as a final test of proof, I went and pulled 1 second of a heavy action scene in the first episode. Sure enough, it was distinctly animated in 24 exact frames, with each frame showing an animation change. Now I will point out that some scenes were poorly animated and is why the quality often looks better in animated movies. In these spots, the animators of the show simply shot each frame twice, filling out the 24 frames with only 12 actual uniquely drawn cells. This is how they would often make the deadlines, but it of course causes the quality of animation to suffer.

For more proof, here is the text explaination on the DVD extras:

The Analog Process

The one-inch video tape was utilized as the reference source for all subsequent editorial decisions. These tapes reflect what the viewing audience has experienced for more than a decade. These early tapes reflect the quality production available 18 years ago. These masters were transferred from 35mm prints on telecine machines. Film prints generally have limited contrast range and color saturation. Additionally, there is a softness in the video which tends to mask the overall sharpness to the picture.

The downside to this process was the inferior color depth, clarity, and the mount of analog noise. The analog video technology of the 1980's was far inferior to the digital film transfer process available today.

The Digital Process

Today, the film is typically 35mm negative instead of a 35mm print. The negative is ultrasonically cleaned using an electrostatic process with counter rotating buffers and alcohol (the alcohol is for cleaning the film). The film passes over sticky rollers, further cleaning the film (like a lint brush). It is then digitally transferred to a digital Betacam videotape.

The digital nature of the image source is retained in all subsequent copies. The analog tape format is not so forgiving when multiple copies are required from one master tape. Digital Betacam can be reproduced almost infinitely with no signal degradation.

Because the film-to-tape process has improved dramatically over the years, today's film transfers are quieter (less noise in the picture), cleaner, and more colorful. Also, the film technology has improved, creating grainless film stocks with greater color range and color clarity.

Over the years, the simple physical handling of these 18-year-old film negatives has created some physical defects that can't be prevented. Some remaining dirt is embedded in the emulsion of the negative.

Alas, we don't live in a perfect world and like all things, film ages.

As part of the restoration process, attempts were made to minimize the abrasion and scratches in the subsequent assembly process. A process called "dust-busting" was employed to eliminate the more noticeable dirt, hair, and animator dandruff. This process is unique to cleaning films, the process simply takes the previous or next clean film frame and replaces that segment of the picture.

Some instances the dirt, dust, and scratches were too great. The film transfer was subjected to an electronic process of removing scratches and dirt called "DVNR".

The Assembly Process

The 35mm film masters were often incomplete:
-scenes were missing
-scenes were insterted with errors or omissions
-scenes were not completely animated
-characters were not talking whent they should (lights blinking, mouths moving)
-missing layers of animation
-scenes rendered backwards

Clips that were missing were replaced with the original one-inch transfer.

All of the recaps were reconstructed from the 35mm high grain negative transfers.

From assorted additional scenes there are slates indicating the scene and episode number. The episode number is referenced to the Sunbow episode number. These slates are followed by the appropriate replacement action.


Ok so here's a couple pics I took from my HD screen (was not able to pull the contents off directly as the dvd did not read in my drive) showing some of the DVD's own side-by-side comparisons of their direct film transfer and the original broadcast tape:

Click to view attachment

Click to view attachment

Notice in the 2nd pic, they were unable to recover the missing film footage, so that side is blank. For scenes like this, they used the original broadcast master.

Restoring Hybrid 23,976+29,970 which these Rhino r1 DVD's are to 23,976 fps (24fps) is not an easy task

if you had the master tapes then it's easy! don't forget the masters are transferred to mpeg2 hybrid saves 20% file size and bitrate

your using .avi no doubt ?? and xvid awesome MPEG-4 codec but the wrong choice for archiving imo as quant 2 doesn't even give transperant quality (q1 just ups the MB's) try h.264 [mpeg-4 v10 avc] or mpeg-2 (cinema craft encoder)

first thing you should consider is a new container that can handle vfr (virtualFrameRate) like.mkv or .mp4
why do you need vfr ? simple

if you ivtc to 23.976 all 29.970 footage will go to hell and it will play jerky aswell
no matter if you use dgindex (force film) or (honor Pulldown) with a telecide/decimate (decomb or tfm/tdecimate)
same goes for 29.970 ...23.976 footage will playback jerky

note i never use force film unless i get 100% progressive with 96% i rather IVTC and look for bad frames and freeze em

you can install reclock etc .. won't make a difference

3 possible ways actually 4

01 use a telecide filter with a post processing deinterlacer a sharp one and leave it at 29.970fps don't use decimate if dgindex shows you have more video (Interlaced) than film (progressive) (Press f5)

02 use a telecide filter with a postprocessing deinterlacer a sharp one and decimate (Cycle=5) if dgindex shows you have more film (progressive) than video (Interlaced) (Press f5)

03 use tfm (telecide) and its vfr option to save the time codes + the Matroska container (.mkv)

04 get a good dvd player with progressive scan and HDMI like a denon, oppo or something... or use a good decoder on the pc like Nvidia's MPEG2 decoder or Powerdvd (with hardware decoding enabled (Nvidia)), reclock,haali's splitter (or overlay for tv-out)and FFDShow (yv12torgb High Quality (nvidia 8600 needs it)

you using wmp o.O ..oo oK ... try zoomplayer kmplayer mplayer anything but windows media crap ...player or worse real ..& quacktime

maybe you'll find this information usefull

encoding or restoring video is not meant for 1 button pushing 30minute readers and acting they spend countless hours/days reading how to use g-knot or any other one button pushing encoders imo.
reason there are so many crappy videos floating around.

I use Gordian Knot for my project, which works perfectly fine for my needs. Once I got the hang of making my own custom settings, I was able to make ivtc conversions that look better than the raw dvd footage (using 2-pass encoding with xvid since I plan on these being smaller files for storage).

Also I hate to tell you this, but the Windows Media Player for Vista Ultimate 64 (which is what I have) actually plays DVD content with fantastic smoothing and on-the-fly ivtc correction. I've compared its playback to numerous other players (including VLC) and its noticably smoother on red tones with black outlines. Of course I found out this version of Windows Media only comes with Vista Ultimate and you have to buy the upgrade to the player if you're not on Vista Ultimate. So I figure I'll use it since I have it.

This is what I was referring to...

it would seem that they were trying to meet deadlines quite often

though in MTMTE in particular, the animation frame rate is noticeably improved over most episodes (Rebirth being another one that comes to mind).

Gordian knot huh
btw i run vista ultimate 64 and xp32 ..best player (imo) for both are zoomplayer 6 or kmplayer
I see you don't like smooth motion
you said they look better than the raw they don't actually you just removed the interlace to progressive any good software deinterlacer on your pc does the same.
another good example is Rhino's TransFormers The Movie << IT IS 23.976 FPS but has been pulled down to 29.970 to play on a dvd player (25.000 (Pal) 29.970 (NTSC) but still shows a progressive picture.

the thing that's kinda weird is this
you boldly claim this :



a decade ??? and still using a beginners tool like gordian knot ???
you did extensive research on the subject right heh read it again

sorry mate but it seems like you don't know very much about video at all if you need some help i can help you i do have more than a decade of experience i started in 1992 (vcd era) as a amature and for the last 12 years as a professional. (Work)

First, my claim of over 10 years film experience has NOTHING to do with Gordian Knot. I'm talking actually handling 35mm film. If you want to be a jerk about that, that's your problem.

Second, Whether or not Gordian Knot is a "beginners" tool is completely irrelavent. It does the job with excellent results, something even you have to concede, mr. expert.

Third, I did not "just remove the interlace to progressive". Doing just that will still leave you with 29.97 fps, just no interlacing artifacts. IVTC removes the unwanted stretched frames as you well know, leaving the the animation "smoother" because there are no ghost frames trying to interpret how the animation should look. In frame 3 of the NTSC frames example on my web page, you can see how the background is ghosted such that you never get to see it in the NTSC version, yet its rendered completely in the IVTC corrected version. That's what I mean by smoother.

FInally, I've already tried other players like Zoom and found they invariably had something I did not like about the display. It all comes down to a matter of preference, and when I play dvd content on Media player for vista ultimate, it looks cleaner than other players. In fact, I will upload a couple of comparison pics to point out exactly what I'm talking about.

Ok, here's exactly what I'm talking about with the dvd playback feature on WMP for Vista Ultimate. In this pic, take note of how smooth the reds are around the eyes of both Megatron and Starscream:




Now take a look at how this same frame looks on virtually every other "free" media player:



Now those same reds have a decidedly pixelyzed look to them. Incidentally the free version of Zoom player has REALLY bad problems with crashing, hanging, and buttons showing up on the screen that do not get cleared when a new command or function is opened. I got so fed up with it, I uninstalled it in complete disgust. If I have to buy a decent media player just for DVD playback, I'm very well satisfied with the output from WMP on Vista Ultimate as you can see from the example pics above.

bieng a jerk ...right thats why i offered help in the first place ...you just don't want to listen thats your problem! not mine

ever considered that ivtc can cause jerky playback ?? on hybrid and Full Interlaced sources (most of the toon now are full (100%) interlaced becuase they are computer generated take galaxy force for example)

gordianknot is a nice tool sure nothing wrong with it ...but xvid needs settings changed and/or a custom matrix to get the max quality out of it.

nvidia's decoder does "ivtc" on all dvd's that are encoded with 23.976 + pulldown restoring it to its original frame rate with no interlacing or ghosting ! nvidia's decoder is equal to most expensive dvd players on the market

http://www.hardware.info/nl-NL/articles/am...dia_Purevideo/8
use babelfish to translate or look at the score card only

http://www.hardware.info/en-US/articles/am...nd_DVD_players/

dude what ever makes you a happy camper if you want to watch jerky toons be my guest just don't claim you know what your doing becuase you don't thats perfectly clear.
and calling people names sure is childish especially when someone is trying to help :S

o well best of luck on your project

regards
Mr Expert

Picture one is 23.976 (meaning Ivtc on the fly)
Picture two remain 29.970 but is deinterlaced
now use zoomplayer with nvidia's decoder for example (automatic + overlay) the picture will be sharper and more vivid.

Is there a smiley of a spinning head?

Well let's see... In your first post, you tossed out a bunch of terminology in rather poorly constructed sentences and I saw no mention of what programs you prefer to use for your own conversions. No links provided, no detailed descriptions of your own methods, just a bunch of figures randomly strewn together in half-assed english. Then your followup replies just give me a hard time for using programs like GK (you probably assume AutoGK the way you've been acting about it), which is funny because GK is actually quite well respected. Then you bag on me for using WMP, which I had explained works perfectly fine for viewing DVD content and comes down to a matter of preference. I even gave other players like Zoom a chance, but they were either too buggy or you had to buy full versions to make them decent. No that's not good enough for you, much like how Mac users bag on Windows users. To top it off, you make the insinuation that I'm somehow a liar on my claim of film experience (which again you confused with video editing experience). That's acting like a jerk in my book.



Ever consider I already looked for this issue? I didn't just blindly press a button and assume everything was encoded properly with smooth playback. I'm very obsessive about A: having the frames accurately recreated, and B: that they play back correctly without jerky movement. When the telecine source is 100% film, I know wtf to do with that and conversely when its filled with hybrid sections. You have to know exactly what you're dealing with in terms of the source file. You know this perfectly well.




Here again it sounds like you think I just throw files into AutoGK or something and click encode. Believe it or not I actually know how to change xvid settings, and I also used Vdub by itself for quite a while before even downloading GK. My first program was Womble DVD Wizard, but I found that to be terribly inadequate for my needs. It does decent trimming, but has virtually no control over filtering and deinterlacing options. All it has is a basic deinterlace, which looks like crap on the output.



That's great and all but if I'm on an ATI graphics card, it doesn't much help me. Feel free to bag on me for choosing the wrong card too.



Yes just go right on thinking that, and thanks for your "help" of basically just bagging on the software I use even though the resulting output file has NOTHING wrong with it other than not being your preferred choice of encoding/storage. The whole point was very simply to demonstrate that there is a way to reverse the NTSC telecine process on animated films and that I wasn't an "idiot" for claiming such a process was done to these cartoons to begin with. Instead you turned it into this chest-thumping war by bagging on the "beginner" tools I use when that's completely irrelevant.



Thank you. Best of luck to you as well.

native language not english (now who's bieng a jerk ?)
never called you an idiot you did that yourself



read it again .... take a look

01 use a telecide filter with a post processing deinterlacer a sharp one and leave it at 29.970fps don't use decimate if dgindex shows you have more video (Interlaced) than film (progressive) (Press f5)

02 use a telecide filter with a postprocessing deinterlacer a sharp one and decimate (Cycle=5) if dgindex shows you have more film (progressive) than video (Interlaced) (Press f5)

03 use tfm (telecide) and its vfr option to save the time codes + the Matroska container (.mkv)

04 get a good dvd player with progressive scan and HDMI like a denon, oppo or something... or use a good decoder on the pc like Nvidia's MPEG2 decoder or Powerdvd (with hardware decoding enabled (Nvidia)), reclock,haali's splitter (or overlay for tv-out)and FFDShow (yv12torgb High Quality (nvidia 8600 needs it)

lmao on the software remarks ...i use gknot to calculate/or crop black bars its the easiest program for it ..on a ati card nvidia's decoder works aswell ( and you think you know everything:s)

and using gknot and its filters is relevant your better of using tfm/tdecimate like i mentioned before



thats so funny becuase people who know about film and editing know what i'm talking about

i could go on and on but to no avail ..you just won't understand call it bagging call me a jerk heh

talk about half-assed english >

your the only jerk arround here ..looks around yup its you
(I might have been a little harsh due to my half assed english..who knows )

for your info and anyone that wants to know i'm using:

avisynth
decomb (telecide and decimate)
TFM
TDecimate
Tdient
ideei2
lanczos4resize
splineresizers
dcbob
hqd3dn
deen
colormatrix
etc etc etc...

GKNOT (O.O) for cropping and resizing
VirtualDub (huffyuv or lagarith Lossless)
MeGui for x264
CinemaCraftEncoder SP2 for mpeg2
Sonic cinevision for h.264 - VC1- mpeg2(HD)
Sonic softencode dolby digital 5.1
adobe audition

i could have answered in a nasty way but that would bring me down to your level and thats not even worth it.

but still good luck with your project
(your actually one that has been reading something about encoding thats a big +)

If English is not your first language, then perhaps you should master it as well as you have video editing. It would have been a MAJOR help in figuring out just where you're coming from. Beyond that, your reply is still with a jerk attitude, and I've had enough of dealing with your taunts. From now on, I'm no longer reading your posts.

News update on my progress:

First, I want to apologize to everyone for getting involved in derailing this thread topic with drama.

At any rate, I spent a lot more time reading documentation and struggling to get codecs installed on my Vista 64 OS. It seems you can't use .inf install methods on 64bit, so I ended up have to do a command line install (which was riddled with hidden security blocks). Gotta love Vista's "user friendly" hidden features...

I now use Avisynth directly with DGMPGDec and also several filters, most importantly Decomb. I took the one-inch broadcast tape transfer of the orginal G1 credits and applied IVTC via Decomb with Cycle 5 Decimation. I checked frame-by-frame in VirtualDub and confirmed the proper duplicate frames were dropped. Then from there I began cleaning and cropping the video. I also added in some slight adjustment to the saturation and sharpness, though I need a filter that controls the levels of RGB individually as the red tones are a little intense.

Here's the full-quality restored G1 credits (avi format with ffdshow xvid encoding):

G1 Credits Restored 23.976fps

for someone not reading my posts heh you actually did read it didn't you
maybe the jerk with half assed english did help huh

BT-22 Convoy, dude if you're trying to be of help, then cool, but you are coming off as kind of a ass. If you're going to argue with the guy actually doing it then leave the thread its his. If you know how to do it so much better, then do it yourself. He's the one taking the time to do it in the process he feels comfortable with. If you know how to do it better then go do it and quit throwing your "input" around.

Cool work btw Firebrandx

fine with me mate
if he had been more friendly i would have shown him what i know even the avs script (avisynth) so he could use them for encoding to xvid becuase i allready did re-encode them to full progressive with pulldown to store them back on DVD (rhino's dvd boxsets) which whas insanely difficult to get them to playback smoothly.
i whas an ass your right in some reply's but hey look at his replies ..check out the reply's the bloke wrote not everyone is an american or brit on here
yea i wanted to say to much but wrote to little i guess i whas excited that someone else loved g-1 toons so much to restore them to the original state thought he whas a encoder that knew what he whas doing ...my mistake.

Another update:

I've been hard at work restoring the 3-part "More than Meets the Eye" pilot. I found that even setting Decomb's IVTC params to the most sensitive detection, it was still mis-matching fields on scenes with tiny mouth movements or other small animations. I had no choice but to start matching fields manually with an override script file. The process is slow, but it ensures 100% accuracy and avoids having to use any sort of post deinterlacing. I'm up to frame 70,000 of the 110,000+ frames in this one-hour seamless edit of the episodes. I've done a test video output of what I've finished so far and it looks great!

The downside of looking at each frame on close inspection is seeing some pretty horrible animation/color mistakes. I saw several frames with multiple Starscreams and Soundwaves, one scene with SEVEN Reflectors, and another scene with like nine seeker jets in various shades of blue-green.

One scene that made me crack up laughing was from the off-shore oil platform battle. I took a screen cap and added in my own caption:



They should have left him guarding the base!


Anyway, I expect to be finished with the pilot restoration in a couple weeks. After that, I may start on the next episodes since each one is only 22 minutes and will be quicker to finish.

Best part of the thread!

New progress update:

I've finished reconstructing the frames! Over 113,000 frames in total (cut down to 90,000 after decimating for film 24fps). I spent about 40 hours total on this stage of the restoration process.

The next phase is now cleaning each frame of noise and artifacts. I've combined a set of filters and programmed them for the best possible noise reduction I could get while still maintaining good detail. Here's a comparison pic below of Bumblebee (top frame is raw dvd image, bottom frame is my cleaned version):



I've NEVER seen these old toons look so good! Unfortunately the process is very computation heavy, and the estimated cleaning time for the 1-hour pilot is going to take over 8 hours on my computer. I'll have to set it to cleaning over night. After that, I'm going to burn it off onto a DVD and then make a compressed 512x384 PC file version for kicks.

while it definately looks CLEANER... it seems like it is now color-book (fill in) clean and lacks a bit of depth and grain/texture to it. I'm no video expert, or even a novice - just a pure observer. I found the thread enjoyable to read (even despite the small diversion of drama). I admire the time someone is putting in to a project and even updating their process-- much like a scientist updating a scientific journal as he seeks his objective. I"m just saying, I'm not sure I like the 'clean' look of the 2nd frame more than the 1st tho. It feels like someone needs to airbrush some texture and shading onto him - if that makes sense. *shrug* Just one man's opinion.

Hey thanks for the input!

The above filter image is outdated as I've since switched to a professional filter called "neat video". I had to pay 50 bucks for it but it was worth every penny. It removes all the video noise while leaving full detail intact. I was nothing less than thrilled with the final results! However, in order to preserve the new "restored" looks of the frames, I had to use a different codec and went with "H264". The size of the 1-hour video file ended up being almost exactly 4 GB, so I was able to burn it off on a single DVD - R. The quality and animation seems on average about 3 times better looking than the DVD footage, so its been well worth the effort. I'm basically seeing these early episodes the best they have ever looked, short of a new blu-ray transfer.

I will more than likely go ahead and restore the rest of season one and see how it goes from there.

Just to bring the restoration comparison pictures up to date, here's my final output versus the original raw dvd footage (top frame is DVD, bottom frame is my restored frame):



In addition to using the "neat video" filter, I also applied a slight reduction in the saturation. They were maxed out by Rhino's transfer, which is not accurate. Also please note that I don't remove any original detail in the image, only the video noise is being removed. So what you're seeing on the bottom frame is how the original artist cell looked before being transfered to NTSC broadcast media.

and full season 1 clips of each season will be available for watching or download shortly......

That's pretty sharp. I applaud your effort and can't wait to see the finished project. You've got a fan in me.

Thanks!

I don't know if it would be legal for me to share the restored file, which brings me to:



Are they making them public domain now? I know you can watch all the episodes on youtube, but that's always been a questionable practice there. If they are making them public domain, I'd be willing to share my restored versions on emule. They are quite the hefty file size though. As I mentioned before, the restored one-hour pilot took up 4 gigs on its own. That would make individual episodes about 1.3 gigs a piece. If I encode them with xvid, that would cut the files sizes down to a few hundred MB, but it also reveals compression artifacts and color banding.

You can watch five G1 episodes(Season 2) on hasbro's site, but that's about it when it comes to legal G1 online viewing, I believe.

That's pretty awesome. I've been enjoying following this thread since it first started.

I'm kind of hoping Hasbro was one step ahead and is doing this process for their More Than Meets The Eye DVD that comes with 25th Anniv. Prime. (I've heard that it's remastered.) but if not, maybe you could bring this to Hasbro's attention and have a job.

Or a C&D, but either way..this is a neat process. I love how the latest images have that "fresh cel" look. I look forward to the rest of the project.

Agreed.

This restoration project is just simply amazing Firebrandx. This will look awesome when we get to see it in motion. All of those painstaking hours must have payed off big time for you.

Might I also sugest puting these episodes on a download site like Megaupload instead of Youtube?

Well as I said, I've already finished the one-hour pilot. Having watched the final product myself, I'm very pleased with how it turned out. What's really amazing is rewatching the original DVD and seeing just how much worse it looks now compared to the restored file. Not only is there messy noise all over the place, but the animation really looks worse when embedded in an NTSC 3:2 pulldown format. The problem I'm facing is whether it would be legal to share the restored file. Youtube is out of the question. The file is simply too big for me to upload in that method. I'd perfer sharing it on emule and just have that running in the background while I'm working on other tasks.

Getting back to the restoration process, I've decided its not worth doing a frame-by-frame removal of scratches on the film itself. For removing those, I'd want my own access to the direct print transfer files Rhino used such that a master file can be made with each frame manually restored. This master file would then be used for multi-format releases like blu-ray for example. I'd also like to point out that digitally removing scratches by hand normally costs companies quite a lot of money, and for that reason is rarely done. Naturally I would do it for next to nothing if they hired me for the project, but that's in a dream scenario of course.

Ah, I see. But what is emule?

emule is a filesharing program that uses the edonkey network system. There should be plenty of info on it from doing a google search. I normally use it to share chess endgame databases, which is very legal and encouraged amongst the chess community. Naturally there are people that use the network for sharing not-so-legal files if that's your thing.