This is a story of Johnny Rotten: Metro Broadcast uses Archangel to deal with the Sex Pistols and earns a big restoration contract with Universal UK - It's Always Something - Brief Article

Post, Nov, 2002 by Ken McGorry

LONDON -- It was the '70s. Pop giants like ABBA and Elton John had ruled the airwaves for years. But by 1977 a new sense of iconoclastic energy was in the air--punk rock--and punk's arguably most conspicuous primogenitor, Johnny Rotten, brought his band to Stockholm one night to stir things up.

Flash forward 25 years and by 2002 the punk movement has taken on historical significance. So much so that last summer the British Film Institute organized a film retrospective of great punk rock performances for showing at London's National Film Theatre. In this case, "great means Rotten's Sex Pistols, In true anti-establishment fashion, the BFI would screen only rare, unreleased or very limited-viewing material at their event No glossy, record-label productions for MTV, but the real thing, documenting the punk rock movement's gritty energy where it first evolved--on the live stage.

The BFI had a perfect contribution from the Sex Pistols. Their early stage show in Stockholm was recorded on 16mm film by none other than ABBA's official cameraman. (Hmmm ... was he collecting evidence of an anti-ABBA backlash that would ultimately see the Swedish pop group's work relegated to late-night I-800 commercials? No, the Pistols' tour manager, John Tiberi, simply hired the shooter to document the show.)

The Pistols' performance in Stockholm was visceral. The film was transferred to tape. And now, 25 years later, the original film was long gone and all that was left was one crummy 20-minute low-band U-Matic. Enter Metro Broadcast (www.metrobroadcast.com) and technical operations manager Michael Smith.

Heretofore, classic film and video restoration had been a classic time-and-money problem: How do you restore a given project quickly and efficiently enough to justify the notoriously low budgets that studios or film archive organizations typically have to offer? But now Smith had a brand new box, Archangel from Snell & Wilcox. Archangel promises realtime digital restoration for large amounts of footage, making it possible for one person to oversee the automatic restoration of large libraries of program footage.

However; the Rotten footage did not promise to be an automated job. "The condition of the U-Matic was quite severe," Smith says, "the tape itself was deteriorating, with bad video line dropouts and tracking errors. The ferric oxide was shedding; it was clogging up the heads."

At least you could hear the band play. "The audio didn't sound too bad, actually," Smith says, "it was retrievable after several attempts at cleaning the machine. That's how we managed to get, at least, a stable picture out." By starting and stopping the 3/4-inch machine and continually cleaning it, Smith and company gradually compiled a D-Beta sub-master.

Smith makes the Pistols' restoration sound easy when he says "Archangel took out all the drop-outs" but this job required special attention. To what extent can you trust any automated box to make the right decisions in restoring badly damaged material? "Initially, Snell & Wilcox built the Archangel as a one-pass operation," says Smith. "What we've found is that we can utilize all the filters more effectively scene by scene to combat the faults that exist. We can go back onto tape again, or we can go onto a hard drive storage system if we need to. The quickest way is tape to tape; then we can encode it at a later date." However; Smith adds, "the operational side of Archangel is more of a specialist area where the operator has to be qualified and experienced enough to identify the faults and apply the correct filters in the right place." There are about 30 filters on Archangel that focus on different faults.

With Archangel, Smith says, operators can either do the entire frame or "key off" certain sections of a frame to concentrate the different filters more intensely. "The whole process is realtime, and we wouldn't keep going back and back--we'd set the filters up and let it run. If there's a scene change and a different fault comes up then, obviously, we apply a different filter and do the corrections needed."

So, as different faults would present themselves in the Sex Pistols concert tape, Smith would stop the tape, adjust the filters, and do a pick-up edit. Metro has a separate edit controller--the Sony PVE 500 with an RS 422 interface--for that job.

The audio, raw as it was, was appropriate to the subject matter and, Smith says, the restored Pistols concert footage was projected from Digital Betacam onto a full size cinema screen on the night of BFI's "Punk at the National Film Theatre" event.

Archangel restoration is a new addition to Metro's 15-year-old broadcast services activity, which originally included duplication and hiring out broadcast production gear. "Metro Broadcast," says managing director Mark Cox, "is a specialist communication company wholly owned by WPP. They own advertising and PR companies such as Ogilvy and JWT. We've moved more toward value-added services and we now have five Avid editing suites and a Sony Xpri suite for high definition editing."