Sydney Perkins (she/her)

I am a hard-working film preservationist with nearly 15 years of professsional experience.

My interest in film preservation and restoration has been lifelong, and I have spent my entire adult life in the field, starting out as a volunteer at the Moving Image Research Collections in 2012 the summer after I graduated high school. I am a 2017 graduate of the L. Jeffrey Selznick School of Film Preservation at the George Eastman Museum.

I have worked and interned at numerous institutions, both non and for-profit. I have extensive experience physically handling countless film formats, stocks, and gauges spanning the entire history of film, both common and unusual. I have significant experience personally operating many film scanner models currently in use. I am good with command line software and GUIs. I have presented panels at conferences and collaborated with a number of people in film preservation. In my spare time I run the group Save All Dubs, which has made significant contributions to the documentation and preservation of historical film dubbing.

I don't have any social media (other than a Letterboxd account, if that even counts, and my Discord account), so if you want to contact me, my email address and Discord username are at the bottom of the page.

The underlying theme of a lot of my work is communication, I guess. I have great interest in film dubbing, versioning, intertitles, subtitles, translation, and sound restoration. Most of these subjects have been lifelong fascinations.

Optical Track Restoration Origami Technique (OPTROT)

From 2024 to 2025, while unemployed and looking for work after completing my MLIS at the University of Toronto, I invented a digital restoration process for bilateral variable area optical tracks that requires only some off the shelf software, such as Blackmagic Fusion. I spent virtually every day, including weekends, tirelessly perfecting this technique on my own, with little support other than my collaborator Ben Solovey. No complex algorithms are used, no AI is used. It's bafflingly simple, and it became simpler the more I developed it.

All I do is take image scans of a bilateral variable area optical track, fix the gamma, max the contrast until it is pure black and white, and fold the image of the track on top of itself in various ways, like origami. This eliminates the vast majority of surface wear on the track, and therefore eliminates crackle when I convert the image back to audio using AEO Light. I then do manual restoration of remaining wear. That's it.

This process is a Domesday Duplicator for variable area optical tracks, if you like. In my professional opinion, variable area tracks should be restored using this process whenever possible; it ought to be a regular tool in the restorer's toolset. And because the process is entirely visual, it bridges the gap between the disciplines of film picture and film sound restoration more than ever before. I hope this will open up more opportunities for collaboration between picture and audio restoration artists.

Benefits of my technique:

1. The result sounds as good as possible with the least amount of effort possible. If a magnetic master does not survive, this is the next best scenario. As a matter of fact, more than one person has compared the result to a mag.
2. Can be implemented on any existing, sufficiently overscanned film transfer of minimum 2K resolution containing a variable area track.
3. Manual cleaning is often limited.
4. I use an optical tracking algorithm in Fusion to horizontally stabilize the track, and this requires some manual tinkering for each project in order to prevent digital artifacts from appearing in the final result. So unlike sound restoration techniques in which digital artifacts tend to be an irreversible byproduct (i.e. wateriness in noise reduction), in this technique, digital artifacts are intentionally prevented before the final result is even rendered.
5. By protecting the original audio signal and raising the bar for damage on an optical track, I am enabling insight into numerous subtleties and nuances that are usually undetectable in conventionally restored optical tracks. This will be a benefit to scholars and researchers. For example, in experiments I conducted over the year it took to create this process, I worked from an optical track made from a mix that used needle drops for all or nearly all of its music and effects (a needle drop is audiophile terminology for a transfer of a phonograph source, which is obvious because of the presence of baked-in crackle). If the track had been restored conventionally, the baked-in crackle would have most likely been indistinguishable from the dust on the optical track itself, and it would have been wiped out.

Projects restored using my technique:

• 2024-2025: 16mm electromechanical FMV games, including Wild Gunman, Sky Hawk, and Battle Shark. The first two mentioned were restored using an earlier, much more manual version of the technique. Collaboration with Ben Solovey using scans of 16mm prints that he provided.
• 2024-2025: Manos, the Hands of Fate, an orphaned regional film produced in El Paso, Texas in 1966. Primary test subject for my process. Collaboration with Ben Solovey using scans of the 35mm optical track negative that he provided.

Projects in progress using my technique:

• 2025: The English dub of The Last Gunfight, one of the earliest extant English dubs by the Tokyo-based English dubbing community (ca. 1960 - 1961). Preservation by Save All Dubs from a 16mm print.

I am also developing a technique for restoring variable density tracks from image scans. I am looking for more specimens to use as test subjects for that. Please contact me if you can help.

I am looking for freelance work using my bilateral variable area technique. Please contact me if interested.

A video demonstration of my sound restoration technique using a worn 35mm print source

sydneyperkins.archivist@gmail.com

pathebaby on Letterboxd

pathebaby on Discord