TV Bandeirantes in Brazil digitize 17.000 hours of historic collections

The TV station Grupo Bandeirantes, which recently celebrated its 55th anniversary, partners up with Piql to preserve 17.000 hours of historic moments within politics, sports and Brazilian culture created by TV Bandeirantes.

For three months, teams have been working to implement an AI assisted automated image remastering system. This is a technology that has come out of our AV-Treasure research project. The first content in the remastering phase is the telenovela Os Imigrantes, written by Benedito Ruy Barbosa, Wilson Aguiar Filho and Renata Pallottini, shown by the station in 1981.

All chapters will be remastered to Full HD resolution. The process consists of rescuing the material in its original NTSC format (720X480) and remastering the images with pixel gain to Full HD (1920X1080) with the application of restoration filters and image optimization using automated processes.

“We knew that the traditional remastering process involved many systems and processes that are performed by remastering artists and are time consuming and costly. After a lot of research, we got to know Piql's technology, and we obtained excellent quality results in a completely automatic way”, says Caio Carvalho, executive director of communication and institutional affairs at Grupo Bandeirantes de Comunicação.