The Reel Thing XX
June 6-7, 2008
Linwood Dunn Theatre
Los Angeles, CAPreliminary Program Abstracts
Additional Abstracts to be added.Friday Keynote: In the Beginning of Digital End to End
Leon Silverman
LaserPacific Media CorporationIn the beginning there was film. In the end, it will be digital. What must we do to avoid wandering in the desert for the next 40 years hoping for the promised land of an industry whose approach to workflow and archive was as elegant as the last 40 years?
Saturday Keynote: Film Grain – Digital Restoration’s “Get Out of Jail Free” Card
Rob Hummel
Digital Cinema, DALSAWe are experiencing an era of people from the digital and video imaging arenas restoring our motion picture legacy, many of whom have no substantive experience from the film world. Many have a disdain for film imaging, and will quickly dismiss image artifacts as native to the film original, rather than be sure that the artifact wasn't introduced by digital processes.
Managed Archival Storage and Automated Repurposing on a Single Platform
Robert (Chip) Aycock
Mosaic Digital StudiosThis discussion will focus on the entertainment industry rush to create large digital archives of mezzanine files that may become useless as distribution requirements change. An alternative is available to encode once and make the digital archive the cornerstone of digital distribution now and in the future by unifying these objectives on a single platform.
4K Digital Workflow and Archiving
Mitch Bogdanowicz
Executive Vice President of Imaging Science, Post Logic StudiosDenis Leconte
Vice President of Software Engineering, Post Logic StudiosThis presentation outlines the varied image sources, workflow and archiving for a 4K digital pipeline. The topics include: A comparison of film vs. digital acquisition for a 4K digital element; A discussion of the factors that influence the true resolution housed in a 4K image file; Storage requirements for a 4K theatrical project and the impact on the hardware that is needed to handle the data; An example of a 4K Dalsa camera project workflow with a 4K projector display venue; A discussion of the practicality of a full 4K workflow with today's technology; Challenges for the archiving of a 4K project and the restoration consequences will be presented.
The Digital Restoration of "Lola Montes"Tom Burton
Technicolor Digital ServicesNow considered one of Max Ophuls' masterpieces, "Lola Montes" was released to a lukewarm reception in 1955. To bolster sagging box office returns, the film was shortened and re-cut, undergoing many major changes and straying greatly from Ophuls' original creative intent.
Under pressure, Ophuls conceded to his distributor's demands, agreeing to a second, slightly different cut of the film which included re-dubbing of the film's German dialogue with French voices. Finally, in 1957, despite the objections of Max Ophuls, the film was re-cut into a linear and chronological, and even shorter, version of the film (nearly 30 minutes had been removed) with voice over, completely destroying the film's intended structure and the director's intent. This version was also released in 2.35: 1 aspect ration instead of the original Cinemascope, 2.55: 1 aspect ratio.In 2007, at the request of the film's rights holder, Les films du Jeudi and Laurence Braunberger, daughter of Pierre, and La Cinematheque Francaise, in association with The Thomson Foundation and The Franco-American Cultural Fund, Technicolor Digital Services undertook the challenge of preserving Max Ophuls' vision by faithfully reconstructing and restoring the director's original cut of the film.
This presentation explores the various solutions and techniques employed throughout the restoration process, including the seamless integration and color matching of elements from disparate source types, the re-balancing of fluctuating separation densities, the extraction and reproduction of missing color information from faded print elements, the repair of severely scratched, torn and dirt-imprinted sequences, and the de-warping of shrunken or stretched elements.
Restoring French Heritage: the Classic Films of Marcel PagnolBruno Despas
Vision Globale - MontréalJean-Yves Deschênes
Vision GlobaleMarcel Pagnol was one of the most famous French novelist, poet, playwright and film-maker of the 20th century. He made 35 films between 1931and 1967, mostly photographed and directed in the beautiful and charming French region of Provence. Several of them went on to enjoy great success in the French cinema.
The Compagnie Méditerranéenne de Films, rightful owner of Marcel Pagnol's films, commenced a restoration process in 2007, the purpose of which was to completely restore the whole catalogue of films. This would help them modernize their distribution on the multiple formats of today and tomorrow, while insuring the preservation of the catalogue.
The first 2K restorations, " Le Schpountz " ( 1938 ), " Naïs " ( 1945 ) and "Topaze ( 1950 )" have already been completed by Vision Globale restoration services, Montreal.
The problematic choice of starting with an outdated element, updating it to today's modern technology proved, as ever, to be a very challenging experience.
Originating from black and white interpositives, wet-gate printed from the nitrate negatives, the picture restoration used the complete digital intermediate workflow chain and GeneSys ®, Vision Globale proprietary restoration software.The restored elements include 35mm negative and print, HDCAM SR and Digital Betacam video masters, as well as 2K digital preservation backups, containing both the original and restored versions. The soundtrack was also digitally restored from the original optical tracks.
The first release on DVD of the restored films occurred in the fall of 2007.
During the presentation, several short clips highlighting various defects and how they were corrected by the means of specially developed tools will be screened. The problem of picture, sound and metadata preservation in a fully-digital world will be emphasized.
Visual Color Matching for Digital Archives
Bruno George
Pacific Title and Art Studio
Creating an archive implies a permanent record of creative intent. In motion pictures where the final intent was achieved on film, the archive needs to be matched to a film guide print. Frequently, the actual approved guide print isn’t available for matching, so some care needs to be applied to the task of matching, depending on the generation of the provided guide print.
The Phonautogram: Recorded Sound's First Medium
David Giovannoni
First Sounds ProjectThe first carrier of recorded sound was not a tinfoil sheet or a wax cylinder. It was a soot-covered piece of paper called a phonautogram. The First Sounds collaborative recently recovered the sounds captured on the earliest phonautograms - advancing by 17 years the advent of audio recording and by 28 years the oldest sound available to us today. David Giovannoni, a principal in the collaborative, discusses the making and makeup of phonautograms, issues concerning their identification and conservation, and the challenges of restoring the world's oldest sound recordings.
New Trends for Audiovisual Preservation following European Research Initiatives
Didier Giraud
INA - Institut National de l'Audiovisuel FranceThis presentation will focus on results just carried out by the European project PrestoSpace (htttp://www.prestospace.eu). This project was shared in 4 Work Areas: Preservation; Restoration; Storage & Archive Management; Metadata, Access & Delivery.
The Preservation work area results will be explained in detail. Different prototypes such as Film scanner dedicated to Archives, Audio Disk player without contact and new Audio Tape player delivered for safeguarding the audiovisual heritage in a more better, cheaper, faster way, will be presented.
It's Not Just Analog - Recovering Problematic Digital Audio Tracks
Robert Heiber
Chace AudioIt has been well documented that acetate and polyester based analog audio media is highly susceptible to physical deterioration, making the recovery of the audio from difficult to impossible in many instances. However, archivists and asset managers are now facing similar problems with digital formats that are often less than half as old as their analog counterparts. In fact, digital formats often display multiple issues that make recovery of the audio more challenging. The problems range from physical deterioration of the media to more critical problems such as format/equipment obsolesce, as well as poorly maintained equipment no longer capable of making recordings to factory specifications. Unlike analog recordings, which will often yield audio under extreme conditions of deterioration when a digital format exceeds its error correction capabilities, the loss of audio is complete.
"It's Not Just Analog-Recovering Problematic Digital Audio Tracks" looks at the issues that lead to a complete loss of the audio and identifies methods that can be employed to recover the tracks. This presentation focuses on linear, tape based formats like DAT cassettes, DTRS (DA-88) and ½" DASH tape that are quickly approaching the end of their useful lives.
Jim Houston
Postworks LAThis presentation will discuss issues related to current film scanning practices for archival purposes, the effect of 4K workflows on digital restoration processes, the requirements for digital archival masters and the Academy Image Interchange Framework, and the practical limits of current 4K pipelines.
Digital Linear Magnetic Data Tape Normalization for Existing Content
Steve Kochak
Ascent Media GroupCraig German
Ascent Media GroupContent creators and owners often wish to make a backup of digitally created 2K and 4K assets. This backup usually serves as a non-permanent archive and at some point there will be a desire to include it in a larger asset management strategy. Unlike a traditional studio master such as film or video tape, there is no generally accepted standard for how feature films are written to digital leaner magnetic data tape and, as a result, a myriad of different formats, specifications and proprietary hardware/software based tools are used during the non-permanent archive process. When a content owner chooses to incorporate these assets into a larger asset management system, several problems will become apparent, such as inadequate: labeling of tapes, QC of content, digital checksums and standards for reel segmentation. The purpose of this presentation is to identify problems content owners may face when incorporating feature film assets into asset management systems and explore some solutions to safely normalize existing linear magnetic non-permanent archive data tapes that, in fact, actually become permanent.
Digital Restoration Techniques Developed For DOWN ARGENTINE WAY
Kevin Manbeck
MTI FilmDown Argentine Way - directed by Irving Cummings and staring Don Ameche, Betty Grable, and Carmen Miranda - is a 1940 musical made by Twentieth Century Fox. The film was shot using the three-strip Technicolor process. In the 1960's, the three layers were photo-mechanically registered and printed to create a CRI color negative.
Over the course of the past several months, MTI Film completely restored a 2K digital scan of the CRI element. The newly-restored digital master was transferred to HD video as well as printed back to film. The restoration effort presented some unique challenges because of the YCM to CRI printing process, in addition to generic damage due to the age of the film.
The restoration effort provided MTI Film the opportunity to develop custom algorithms to address the damage present in the film. This presentation will describe three of the algorithms developed for and used on Down Argentine Way: three-layer registration, red channel blooming correction, and flicker/color breathing correction.
Because of errors introduced by the mechanical alignment and optical printing techniques used to create the CRI, all of the material had objectionable misregistration between the three color layers. The misregistration was not uniform, resulting from geometric distortion induced by the printing process. Generally, the left edge of the frame had more misregistration than the right. Additionally, each shot had its own degree of misregistration, and sometimes the registration errors were dynamic within a single shot. The three-layer registration algorithm developed here is a fully-automated technique to measure the degree of misregistration and adaptively correct it.
Once the three colors were properly registered, it became evident that the red channel was slightly less focused than the green or blue channels. This red channel blooming was the result of the printing process. MTI Film developed an automated erosion algorithm to refocus the red channel and mitigate visible red halos around objects.
Lastly, the film suffered from color breathing, or uncorrelated flicker in the three color channels. The color breathing was not uniform throughout the frame, with some parts of the image more affected than others. Each shot had its own level of color breathing, depending on the colors and image intensities present. The third algorithm covered in this presentation is an automated method to measure and correct for color breathing. The corrections automatically adapted themselves to the nature and degree of color breathing present in each shot.
Pergamum: An Evolvable Architecture for Reliable Disk-Based Archival Storage
Ethan L. Miller
University of California, Santa CruzAs the world moves to digital storage for archival purposes, there is an increasing demand for reliable, low-power, cost-effective, easy-to-maintain storage that can still provide adequate performance for information retrieval and auditing purposes. Unfortunately, no current digital archival system - tape, disk, or optical disk - adequately fulfills all of these requirements. To address this challenge, we developed Pergamum, which stores data in a network of "bricks", each of which contains a disk, low-power CPU, and flash memory. Pergamum stores additional redundant information on each brick, allowing the brick to repair itself in many cases, and takes advantage of the bricks' network connections and low-powered flash memory to constantly verify storage integrity between bricks, ensuring data preservation with low power needs. If an error is found, Pergamum can rebuild the lost data with low peak energy consumption, avoiding the need for large-scale power and cooling infrastructure.
The ASC - CDL in Theory and (Mal) Practice
Joshua Pines
Technicolor Digital IntermediatesBeing somewhat of a for-fun-and-profit case study presentation on the use and potential misuse of the ASC - CDL, from on-set basic color correction to final DI.
Unique Challenges Associated with Restoring Perspecta Sound
John Polito
Audio MechanicsPerspecta Sound was a unique sound encoding format used from 1954 - 1957 to create a pseudo-stereo theatrical sound field from a monophonic soundtrack. This presentation will give a brief overview of the technology and discuss the challenges faced in re-mastering Perspecta Sound titles. Specific examples from the restoration of INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS (1956) will be presented in both mono and Perspecta Sound.
Restoring Cinerama – How the West Was Won
Ned Price
Warner Bros. Technical OperationsBill Baggelaar
Warner Bros. Motion Picture Imaging
An examination of the digital restoration of How the West Was Won, focusing on how the new work captures the essence of the production's original Cinerama Roadshow exhibition by combining the three Cinerama film strips into a single seamless 2.89:1 image.The original 3-panel Cinerama negatives were each scanned at 2K resolution, then digitally stitched together to make a single 6K image. Digital software was created specifically for this restoration to resolve camera alignment and image linearity issues inherent in the original photography.
2-Color Motion Picture Processes Redux….
What They Are and How to Get the Most Out of ThemRalph Sargent
Film Technology CompanyContinuing with our multi-year ramble through motion picture technologies which most practitioners assumed had mercifully disappeared…..and also being given to discuss techniques which no matter how well they are practiced never quite live up to the hype bestowed on them, this time we cast our glazed eyeballs on 2-color movies: how they came about and how they managed to live so long (with a few notable exceptions) in B-movie heaven. This presentation will cover the technological theory and history of 2-color movies as well as demonstrate a variety of process samples.
