Some very early films are preserved long after all film stock degraded or burned. The National Archives would make paper prints of every frame of a film and these were pretty durable. They reconstructed some historic films from these.
I'm glad someone found a profitable reason for restoring these films.
Peter Jackson has salvaged and restored a lot of WW1 era footage, colorizing and digitally taking out the jerky movements of the old low speed motion picture film to give a very realistic glimpse at what our troops went through. They even had lip readers figure out what troops were saying and dubbed in the voices.
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