When you go from film to pixels you’re trading a physical grain for a grid of numbers, but the character’s life still lives in the little things. The way the eyes light up, the tilt of the head, that breath before a line – those are the brush strokes. In a restoration you keep those strokes by scanning at the highest resolution, matching the original color temperature, and preserving the original sound waveforms. If you lose the film’s texture you lose the texture of the performance. Think of pixels as paint and the actor’s cadence as the brush; keep the cadence, and the identity stays.

In the 2‑D world you’re still looking at a 24‑fps slice, so the micro‑tension of the jaw comes from the film’s own frame cadence. When you digitise you keep every frame, so that subtle tightening shows up as a few pixels shifting. You rarely have to tweak the pixels yourself; you just make sure the scan is clean, the color is faithful, and the frame timing stays true. If you notice a jump, you might pull a frame forward a millisecond or two, but mostly the original rhythm does the heavy lifting.