Saving Cinema: AI’s Starring Role in Preserving Film Archives

It is 2:00pm on a seemingly normal January day in Los Angeles, where MTI Film’s CEO Larry Chernoff and his team are focused on preserving the legacy of LA’s most famous industry.

It’s been just a week since the January 2025 LA fires devastated parts of the city, but nestled in a quiet corner of Hollywood, MTI Film and its vast collection of movie reels, restoration equipment, and supercomputers are safe. Even so, the catastrophe offered a stark reminder to these cinephiles of nature’s propensity to destroy and reinforced the urgency of preserving the artform most valuable to them.

MTI Film is an international leader in film post-production known for its advanced software. Chernoff has led it since 2005. He takes a moment to demonstrate one of his favorite new developments in film restoration, the DRS Nova MTai FrameGen software, which won an Emmy in 2024 for Technical Engineering.

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This software, with its lengthy name, uses generative artificial intelligence to reconstruct missing frames in damaged film reels. It stands at the forefront of film restoration and is in the center of ongoing debates in the film industry about how, when, and whether AI should be used to preserve cinematic classics. The allure of artificial intelligence in film restoration stems from the inherently vulnerable and physical nature of the medium itself.

Film is a tangible format, storing Hollywood's history in aging canisters. If you have ever watched an older movie and noticed a glitch or missed beat, the problem likely stems from damage to the original reel.

Time is running out, and without restoration efforts, thousands of films from the first 70 years of cinema are at risk of decaying before our eyes. The Library of Congress has estimated that 75% of silent-era films have already been lost to time. As Mike Underwood, the senior colorist and expert in color correction at Picture Shop, says, “Some of the really old film is disintegrating and just falling apart. If it’s not stored correctly, it can literally crumble.” 

In the past, a frame that was damaged would require a human to do frame-by-frame inspection, manual repair, and optical printing. At the time, restorers often had no choice but to accept defeat and hope audiences attributed the awkward jump cuts in the picture to age. All it took to cause this issue was a singular frame in a reel that was damaged, missing, or somehow lost during editing, a process that required physically handling the film and pasting spools of film together.

That is where the MTai FrameGen comes into the picture. It's a groundbreaking AI tool developed by MTI Film that enables the recreation of missing frames, smooths out distracting jump cuts, and eliminates frame slugs. In older film reels, black frames are sometimes inserted where footage is missing or damaged, a practice known as using frame slugs. These placeholders preserve the timing of the sequence but create a visible flicker which disrupts the scene’s visual flow. “In Hollywood, if you don’t understand AI, you’re not going to have a job,” Brian Gaffney, VP of the Product, Software Division at MTI Film, says walking with Chernoff on the way to demonstrate the award winning software.

Unlike traditional restoration methods that required hours of manual repair, MTai FrameGen uses a neural interpolation model to intelligently analyze the motion and visual continuity between surrounding frames and generate entirely new, seamless frames where needed.

The AI is trained to preserve visual continuity, ensuring that the inserted frames maintain consistency in lighting, motion, and texture, even when the shot includes complex elements like waving flags or moving cars. In the past, this kind of repair would have been virtually impossible without introducing obvious visual artifacts like an extra finger or toe. But now, with just the click of a mouse, a missing frame can be accurately replicated, allowing the scene to run as smoothly as if the frame had never gone missing.

Though film itself is a sturdy and reliable technology that can last up to seven decades, maintaining these reels requires significant financial investment. Depending on the historical significance of a film, studios will annually spend tens of thousands of dollars per title to maintain their cinematic history and keep their reels in climate-controlled archival vaults.

Unfortunately, the surplus of film reels pre-1955 means many movies have fallen out of any studio’s care and, as the years pass, the damage grows irreversible. Limited storage space and shifting commercial priorities often accelerate their decay, as many of these reels end up in poorly maintained areas of studio lots, in unregulated storage facilities, or across private collections.

L'Immagine Ritrovata, located in Bologna, Italy, is one of the leading international film restoration companies and works closely with Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation to restore classic movies. Many of these movies are international titles that were previously thought lost to time and are no longer under the care of any studio. Found in scattered private collections or forgotten archives, the Film Foundation has helped in the restoration efforts of over 1,000 movies.

Céline Stéphanie Pozzi, a project manager at L'Immagine Ritrovata since 2003, said film restoration projects can take anywhere from three weeks to one year to complete. It all depends on the client’s budget and the resources they are willing to allocate to preserve a movie. For a project like restoring Charlie Chaplin’s filmography, which included over 70 of his classic silent films, L'Immagine Ritrovata was able to dedicate significantly more time and attention to ensure accuracy and quality due to the importance of the films' cultural legacy in Hollywood history.

Dusty film, scratches, and muted colors are flaws that film restorers have been addressing for years. However, physical decay, which causes film reels to appear as if they have melted, makes it impossible to return certain movies to their original state. The only solution to reviving these decayed works is through artificial intelligence, which Gaffney says “freaks everybody out.”

Many artists critical of AI argue that it constitutes a form of theft, as the technology relies on human-created work without proper attribution or consent. In the film restoration community, some worry that AI tools may overcorrect, removing the subtle detail and emotional depth that give the original material its character.

“It’s incredible how much it impacts your brain. You find yourself thinking, ‘Wait a second, something about this feels fake.’” Gaffney says as he explains how weaker AI tools forgo “The texture and sort of detail that really brings out the emotion in a story.” With regard to artists’ worries about AI, Gaffney says that it doesn't steal, instead AI “infers elements just like we would.”

Even with these incredible advancements in technology, without the human perspective, the AI would not know what needed to be fixed. Tony Martinez of Topaz Labs, another popular software company that major film studios and streaming companies use for film enhancement, expressed the same sentiment. “I think our central thesis as a company is, how do we apply AI in a way that enhances human creativity and doesn't replace it or challenge it?” he says.

Los Angeles-based Picture Shop, a leading post-production company known for restoring titles like Cinderella, Pulp Fiction, and Forrest Gump, aims to present films as their creators originally intended. For most of these important film title restorations, the goal is not to make an incredible profit, rather it is to preserve the film for historic purposes.

While some restorations are timed for major re-releases tied to anniversaries, most are quietly issued without much fanfare and tend to be noticed only by dedicated physical media collectors, who are quick to weigh in on every new restoration. Communities dedicated to film restoration on Reddit are quick to comment on a new restoration. “It's too clean.” or “There's too much grain” are comments restoration artists face upon every release.

For the major titles with devoted fan bases, studios try to bring in people who worked on the original film to approve and consult during the restoration process. But, already, many of the animated classics and silent films no longer have any living witnesses to the filmmaker’s vision, so studios rely on longtime veterans who have worked with these titles for decades to provide insight into what the creators likely intended.

Picture Shop’s restoration process is aided by various software tools, but the team avoids relying on any one AI program alone. It became clear through many discussions that AI is still opaque and difficult for film restorers to define. Every tool offers different capabilities, so using a combination of AI programs allows artists greater precision, flexibility, and creative control.

Artificial intelligence has not yet reached the level at which it can fully reverse physical film decay, but advances are coming at a rapid pace. This raises the ethical question of whether AI should be used to recreate frames lost to time. Film restorers will grapple with this issue among many others in years to come.

More Hollywood history will be preserved thanks to advancing artificial intelligence. But the ultimate responsibility for protecting the movie industry’s historical landmarks still rests with the creative individuals who embrace and utilize these new technological marvels. Their artistic vision is essential to identifying the importance of cinema’s legacy and their expertise is vital to making today’s tools work effectively to protect generations worth of cinematic magic.

AI can guess, but it doesn’t know the soul of a film. You still need a human to look at it and say, “That feels right.”

“Restoration takes patience, technical knowledge, and artistry,” says Gaffney, and “You really have to know which tools to use, and when, to make it look right.”