David Shepard, a film preservationist who restored hundreds of discarded, hidden or forgotten films by masters like Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and F. W. Murnau and packaged rarities for the consumer market, died on Jan. 31 in Medford, Ore. He was 76.

The cause was cancer, said his brother, Donald.

The era of Valentino and Fairbanks had been over for decades when Mr. Shepard, barely in his teens, began buying old films, reel by reel, with money earned from his paper route. He had been bitten by the bug when his uncle Myron, a photographer in the Signal Corps, brought home a projector and a boxful of films from France after World War II — abridged versions of Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” and Georges Méliès’s experimental “A Trip to the Moon,” among others. They kindled an enthusiasm that only grew with time.

Working for the American Film Institute and later for Blackhawk Films, which reproduced old films for the collectors’ market, Mr. Shepard began searching out movies that had been languishing in studio vaults or private collections and bringing them in for restoration.

By trial and error, he developed techniques now used widely in commercial preservation laboratories. In 1989, after acquiring Blackhawk’s library, he created his own company, Film Preservation Associates.