Hands on History: Conserving the Dark Age Legacy of Sutton Hoo (2003)-Narrated by David Attenborough

Описание: I am very excited to share something very rare and special with everyone, a truly exceptional documentary that, until now, existed solely in the realm of two VHS archival copies, accessible only for review within the hallowed halls of the British Museum and UCL library. Previously relegated to the status of lost media, this cinematic gem narrated by Sir David Attenborough chronicles the archaeological excavation of Sutton Hoo. It meticulously documents the unearthing of various artifacts, delving into the dedicated efforts of the museum's conservators working alongside curators and scientists to analyze, investigate and extract information from these objects to discern their significance and the painstaking restoration process that ultimately brought them to the public eye.

Commissioned by the British Museum, this captivating documentary, has long been a subject of intrigue for me. My quest to unearth this hidden treasure spanned weeks of exhaustive research and fruitless inquiries. It was only through the discovery of an obscure newsletter, originally intended for Sutton Hoo's organization members, that I was able to confirm the documentary's existence, its production year, and set the course for its retrieval. My quest to find this film led me to speak with several very smart and fascinating individuals, including archaeological experts, museum curators, and collection managers. Leveraging their collective expertise, I managed to unravel the mystery of this documentary. All these tidbits of information led me to find one of the original crew members who worked on the film back then, and quite remarkably, graciously offered a copy of the film.

That video was quite pixelated and blurry, and seem to have had some frame-rate issues, but it was finally possible to watch it. I then started working on restoring it for quite some time to try and produce the best version possible to share, spending way too many hours working on it to mention. Employing various restoration models, I undertook a scene-by-scene enhancement, tweaking colours, digital noise reduction, removing several duplicated frames while interpolating new one to compensate for the original file's less-than-fluid movements and going as far as recreating the various textual elements of the films for better visibility and duplicating some of the original scene transition. Subtitles were also generated and can be enabled if you wish to do so. While definitely not perfect (some scenes can be rougher than other), considering the source I had to work with, I believe the result should be a big improvement and much easier on the eye considering the source I had to work with. I hope that this will provide a renewed perspective on the archaeological wonders of Sutton Hoo and shed light on the passionate and skilled individual making it all possible..