Sydney Perkins - Film Preservationist Occultist

Sydney Perkins (she/her)

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

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, including film archives, post-production houses, and a stock footage library. I have physically handled countless film formats, stocks, and gauges spanning the entire history of film. I have personally operated many film scanner models currently in use, such as the Lasergraphics ScanStation and Director, the FilmFabriek HDS+, the Kinetta, etc. I am good with command line software like FFmpeg, and I am good with GUIs like DaVinci Resolve.

I have presented panels and posters at conferences such as The Reel Thing (2018) and AMIA (2017, 2024). I have collaborated with a number of people in film preservation, including Ben Model, Amy Heller and Dennis Doros, etc. I appeared as a guest on the podcast Archivist's Alley. 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 feel comfortable attending film preservation events anymore, and I don't have any social media (other than my Letterboxd and Discord accounts), so if you want to contact me, my email address and Discord username are at the bottom of the page.

The underlying theme 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 developed a digital restoration process for variable area optical tracks that requires only some off the shelf software, such as Blackmagic Fusion. I spent virtually every day 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 variable area optical track, max the contrast until it's 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. The result therefore sounds as good as possible with the least amount of effort possible.

Benefits of my technique:

  1. Can be implemented on any existing, sufficiently overscanned film transfer of minimum 2K resolution containing a variable area track.
  2. Extremely extensive, efficient, automated cleaning of surface wear pre-"capture" stage with easily reproducible results.
  3. Limited manual cleaning required.
  4. No digital artifacts result from this process.
  5. By protecting the original audio signal, I'm enabling insight into the audio recording and mixing process of any given film completed on an optical track, which will be a huge 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 contained needle drops (a needle drop is audiophile terminology for a transfer of a phonograph source).

Projects restored using my technique:

A video demonstration of my sound restoration technique

sydneyperkins.archivist@gmail.com

pathebaby on Letterboxd

pathebaby on Discord