Restoration: keeping the past current with new technology and techniques

Post, May, 2004 by Claudia Kienzle

THE surge in demand for film restoration is being fueled by two major trends. First is the recognition by motion picture studios of the value of their content. Before the advent of cable channels, HDTV, DVD and other new distribution outlets hungry for content, movies used to be packed away in vaults with no real plans for re-use beyond the theatrical release. Now, studios want to preserve classic movies for posterity, as well as re-purpose them for re-release in today's exciting new venues.

The second trend is the demand for an ultra-pristine image by consumers of DVDs, HD TVs and other home theater equipment. Because of this, even today's big-budget movies are routinely restored--to remove dirt, scratches, grain, flicker, jitter, among other defects--as part of the digital intermediate process. As a result, the post houses we spoke with all say they have seen a dramatic increase in the volume of film restoration business.

LOWRY DIGITAL

"We have booked more business in the first three months of this year than we did in our entire four-year history. We're incredibly busy," says John Lowry, founder and CEO of Burbank's Lowry Digital (www.lowrydigital.com), whose services are dedicated to film restoration.

Lowry is currently restoring the entire collection of 20 James Bond movies for MGM. They are destined for DVD and HDTV release, however, nine are being scanned at 4K resolution for new negatives. There's also a new movie, directed by James Cameron, destined for IMAX (70mm) release and restoration of the first Stars Wars trilogy for director George Lucas. Restoration work was completed on the Indiana Jones trilogy for director Steven Spielberg and dozens of classic films such as Sunset Boulevard, Citizen Kane, and Casablanca.

Lowry Digital uses proprietary, software, called The Lowry Process, which employs 600 dual G5 Macintosh computers, each with 4GB of RAM, harnessed into a "supercomputer" configuration using a Gigabit Ethernet network and 400 TB of hard disk. Lowry's software automatically eliminates defects like flicker, jitter, weave, dirt, scratches, mold stains and color fading, frame-by-frame, leaving no artifacts.

While the process is digital, with digital data archived on hard drives, Lowry recommends making a new film negative. In fact, "the best method is to make a YCM [yellow, cyan and magenta] three-color separation where the red, green and blue picture information is captured separately on sequential frames on the same film reel. In this way, all three-color records are subject to the same shrinkage or fading over time. "In the 1930s through the 1950s, Disney used this sequential YCM process in photographing animated films such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which Lowry restored last year. He says, "This forward-thinking image capture method results in an ideal film archiving model. Restoration from these sequential YCM separations yields beautiful subtleties in tone and color that we rarely see in color negatives."

TECHNICOLOR CREATIVE SERVICES

Hollywood's film archives are filled with priceless films, many of which are being restored for posterity by Technicolor Creative Services (TCS). Without expert restoration, these cinematic images and sounds could be lost forever. The primary approach that Technicolor takes is to restore films by employing traditional film photochemical processes to preserve and archive the movie as a film, not make a digital copy on data tape or videotape.

"When you create a pristine, new film negative that faithfully captures nearly all of the picture and sound information of the original film, you truly preserve the image of that film. Decades from now, people will be able to hold that film up to a light and see those images, which might otherwise be lost," says Paul Stambaugh, VP of film preservation in the North Hollywood facility of TCS, a division of Technicolor (www.technicolor.com), which is owned by Thomson.

When picture information is stored as 1s and 0s on a tape-based medium, decades from now, there might not be a playback device capable of displaying that picture properly. "The first and most cost-effective step is to try photochemical processes first, such as frame washing dirt and Wet Gate to remove scratches from the film's base, through contact and optical printing methods," says Stambaugh. "Then, if there's a scratch or other defect that can't be eliminated photo-chemically, that original element, or an interpositive of it, could be scanned at 4K and repaired in a digital process resulting in a B-roll element that can be printed and stored with the original negative.

"The best film preservation method is to make a YCM color separation master; where the yellow, cyan, and magenta elements are stored as B & W film negative reels. It's then printed using an RGB light, where the red affects the cyan dye, the green affects the magenta dye, and blue affects the yellow dye. This allows the full reproduction of the original colors with the highest integrity when the three elements are combined through contact printing," Stambaugh says.