Return to Main Page . If they were made for entertainment, reviving them for current showing can earn sizable profits in addition to providing viewing pleasure to consumers. The film archives of some movie studios, in fact, are worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Documentary movies with footage of important people, industrial processes, and current or historical events have great value, too, for educational and archival purposes. Commercial movie-making uses a master film from which others are copied.
Film is a physical thing that can be damaged, soiled or broken like any other object.
But unlike a scratch on a single car, a scratch or other artifact on an old movie master can affect the film's usefulness to viewing audiences and the fortunes of the company that owns it. If the master film is marred, each copy will also be marred. Even if the master film is converted to digital form for making video copies, the artifacts will persist. Everything on the old film, trash and all, is converted to electronic data that go onto the video copy. A frame from the movie Amacord, shown first with several areas that are damaged, and then shown after digital restoration automatically removed the damaged spots and replaced them with the original images.