Before transferring Super 8 film to a digital medium, the archivist or post-production house swabs both sides of the film with alcohol to remove dust, dirt and fingerprints and repairs damaged splices.
The archivist threads the Super 8 mm film into a telecine unit, which projects the footage and captures it frame-by-frame at extremely high resolutions.
In the case of damaged film, the archivist converts the raw telecine to an image sequence. Then, she uses software to clone areas in adjacent frames and remove or reduce the appearance of scratches, stains and other irregularities.
The archivist compiles the image sequence into a video file and burns it to CD.