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MillimeterFirst Person: Restoring Film with Digital Recombination
Aug 1, 2000 12:00 PM, Scott MacQueen and Phil Feiner
Scott MacQueen is senior manager of library restoration for the Walt Disney Company in Burbank, California. Phil Feiner is president/COO at Hollywood's Pacific Title & Art Studio. In 1999, both companies, along with restoration laboratory Cinetech of Valencia, California, restored the William Wellman comedy Nothing Sacred. The companies restored substantial portions of the original film, but one reel suffered damage to the point where traditional photo-mechanical and photo-chemical restoration methods were not sufficient, causing them to try a tricky digital recombination technique. MacQueen and Feiner offer Millimeter readers an inside look at the restoration process they used on reel 1A of Nothing Sacred.
Nothing Sacred-a 1937 screwball comedy directed by William Wellman, produced by David O. Selznick, filmed by W. Howard Greene, and starring Carole Lombard and Frederic March-was among the first three-strip Technicolor feature films ever produced. Within five years of its release, the film changed hands, setting in motion a long chain of printing compromises that degraded the integrity of the original film elements over the last 63 years. As a result, audiences have not seen the film as the filmmakers intended, and the original negative was rendered unsuitable for rerelease, DVD mastering, or even long-term archiving.
When the Walt Disney Company acquired the ABC/Capital Cities film library, it became clear that Nothing Sacred and other David O. Selznick-produced films required intensive restoration to provide the best possible masters for home video and cable delivery and to guarantee long-term viability of these assets in the company's library.
The original 1937 prints of Nothing Sacred had been made using Technicolor's primitive dye-transfer process from matrices created directly from the three black-and-white nitrate separation negatives exposed in-camera. In 1943, the movie was reissued using the less expensive Cinecolor process, utilizing only the Magenta (green channel) and Cyan (red channel) camera negatives to manufacture two-color prints with a distinctlyunnatural red-orange and blue-green palette. At that point, the main-title negat ives were altered to remove the "Color by Technicolor" credit, as well as a further technical card naming Technicolor color consultants. The original negative trims were discarded, and the changes were made to the protection master positives. The altered negatives continued to be used to make Cinecolor prints throughout the 1940s.
The Reel 1A Problem In late 1998, the eight reels of the full show (supposedly, 24 rolls of nitrate separation negatives) were taken for printing to the restoration specialists at Cinetech, a motion-picture lab with great experience in printing old three-strip negatives. That's when we learned there were only 23 rolls. The Magenta negative for reel 1A was missing, and the other seven reels were in poor condition. The reasons for this are complex but typical of historical film-handling practices.
When Nothing Sacred was released to television in the 1950s, the Magenta camera negative was used to make direct 16mm black-and-white reduction prints. Consequently it was subjected to extensive, repeated handling on optical printers and became severely worn and damaged. By the time Disney received the negatives in 1998, the Magenta record was in dismal condition. Reel 1A was completely missing, and the other seven rolls were riddled with perforations that punched and ripped through the picture in many places. Poorly made replacement dupe sections and back-patch repairs bore witness to decades of rough laboratory handling.
Cinetech did a remarkable job repairing the damaged record of the existing reels and successfully printing them, carefully checking and repairing the reels between each pass on a slow printer. The result of that work is the finest representation of all but the first eight minutes of Nothing Sacred that has ever been seen, far surpassing even David O. Selznick's personal nitrate print, which we consulted during the restoration.
But we still needed to solve the serious reel 1A problem. Without an adequate solution, there was no hope for offering a quality restoration for the first eight minutes of the movie. The missing Magenta negative was a crucial element, since Magenta is the most important color record. It contains the greatest tonal information and is the arbiter for grain, sharpness, and flesh-color rendition.
More Bad News Nitrate protection master positives of reel 1A from 1937 were available, however, and we turned to these next.
Cinetech performed a recombined internegative test for us, and that test confirmed our worst fears. Typical of that era, before fine-grain master stock was introduced, these masters were put on black-and-white print stock in 1937, made optically through inferior lenses, and riddled with photographic dirt, grain, hard contrast, soft resolution, and muddy color rendition caused by incompatible gammas. Content-wise, the masters also perpetuated the revised, rather than the authentic, title cards. Brief consideration was given to duping Selznick's 1937 nitrate print, but tests showed that its inherent grain, muddy color, and softness were as bad, or worse, than the recombined master positives.
At Disney's request, Cinetech then performed tests to see if a black-and-white dupe negative of the Magenta record from the master portion of reel 1A could be made and printed in register with the original Cyan and Yellow camera negatives. As expected, however, this approach didn't work because of several factors, including variable shrinkage of the nitrate.
The 1937 master positive, having been made optically, had slightly different geometry from the camera negatives. Distortion of the latitude and longitude of the image caused the recombined color photography to keystone, meaning that while the three colors might register at the bottom, toward the top, the new Magenta record shifted geometry on both the east/west and north/south axes. These field orientations, induced in the 1937 optical manufacture of the master, could not be solved via conventional printing. Since the new record simply could not be made to fit, this approach had to be discarded.
A Digital Solution These problems led Disney to ask Pacific Title & Art Studio's restoration division to test digital recombination techniques by scanning the highest generation nitrate elements: the original Yellow and Cyan camera negatives and the Magenta nitrate master positive. The hope was to perform electronic registration, color balancing, and artifact cleanup and to output a digitally rendered internegative of reel 1A that would seamlessly match the quality of Cinetech's conventional three-strip restoration of the rest of the film.
Simultaneously, Disney saw the opportunity to authenticate the main-title sequence and asked Pacific Title Mirage to investigate utilizing David O. Selznick's personal nitrate dye-transfer print for scanning, as it was the only existing version that still retained the 1937 main title and color credit cards. The scans of these two shots would then be incorporated into the final output in order to meet our objective of providing an authentic version of the highest quality.
While artists were grappling with these technical challenges, we were informed that Nothing Sacred had a European television sale pending, and we were given only 18 business days to scan, process, and turn around the entire reel so that Disney could fulfill the European air-date commitment.
Pacific Title Mirage first scanned the original Yellow negative, then the Magenta positive master, and then the Cyan negative, frame by frame, using a Cineon Genesis Plus digital film scanner. Maximum tonal and color value was insured by scanning the Cineon files at 10-bit log. Each color-separation element comprised 12,415 frames-a total of 37,245 individual photographs since each of the three records had to be individually scanned, steadied, and cleaned.
The Process The first step of the digital restoration process involved cleaning the scans. This required extensive work due to the age of the film and the abuse it had suffered. Poor workmanship on the Magenta master was particularly problematic. A first pass was done using automated tools in Cineon software to remove as many defects as possible. Next, digital painters used Avid's Matador paint package to manually repair dirt and flaws under operator control. Some sequences, particularly the famous Selznick International logo and the two title shots scanned from the nitrate print, exhibited excessive grain, which needed to be electronically reduced. The cleaned files were then composited in Cineon.
Recompositing started with stabilizing the three records, so that they would not bounce against each other frame by frame. Next, scene by scene, the records were aligned as necessary. Sometimes, this involved a simple reposition, while other frames required induced distortion to "stretch" or "warp" one of the records to fit the established geometry of the others.
With the records cleaned and registered, a preliminary color composite was rendered out. Disney supplied the conventional answer print of reel 1B, manufactured by Cinetech, which became the "aim point" for Pacific Title's final output. The preliminary render was then scene-to-scene timed for both color and contrast, and that process was followed by final smoothing work on the transitions for the main-title inserts.
The final version was then rendered and outputted by a Cineon Lightning II film recorder onto Kodak 2244 Intermediate, a stable color-negative film on a polyester base.
At last, Disney had a healthy reel 1A to combine with the rest of the traditionally restored film. Cinetech completed final answer printing, after which several interpositives of the full feature were manufactured for telecine and archiving. The European sale was met with time to spare, and a DVD release of the restored Nothing Sacred was recently announced for release later this year. Disney has also manufactured new polyester YCM masters from both the nitrate originals and the digitally rendered internegative.
Thus restored and preserved "in a tradition of quality" (to quote David O. Selznick's personal motto), Nothing Sacred will now remain viable for centuries to come.
Only a handful of U.S. facilities offer film-restoration services. The majority specialize in photo-chemical surgery on ailing motion pictures. The fledgling art of full-digital restoration is handled by an even smaller group because of the huge cost involved in digitally scanning and recording films. Industry experts say routine, full-digital restorations of full-length motion pictures will have to wait until such costs come down. In the meantime, a small group of facilities are forging ahead on selected digital restoration jobs, in cases where film elements are missing or degraded to the point where traditional techniques won't do the job.
Following is a sampling of U.S. film-restoration companies. The list is not meant to be exhaustive, but it includes the major facilities that Hollywood studios routinely use to restore full-length feature films using either photo-chemical techniques, digital techniques, or a combination of both.
CFI Film Preservation Services/Technicolor Film Restoration Services, Hollywood The recent merger of Technicolor's restoration division with longtime industry player, CFI, has resulted in a combined facility, with over 20 restoration specialists operating out of CFI's headquarters in Hollywood. The company primarily specializes in photo-chemical restorations in both 35mm and 65mm and is one of the few facilities in the world capable of processing 65mm negatives and manufacturing prints. The company also owns Celco film recorders and offers digital scratch removal and other types of repair work. Technicolor/CFI collaborated on the recent 2001: A Space Odyssey restoration and is currently working on Battle of the Bulge, among other projects. Contact: Robert Dennis at (323) 960-7510.
Cinema Arts, Northeast Pennsylvania Cinema Arts is the lab division of the John E. Allen stock-footage company. The lab started in the 1950s servicing Allen's stock-footage library, but now it offers restoration services to a wide range of clients. The lab specializes in photo-chemical work and blow-ups from 16mm to 35mm. Cinema Arts regularly services museum projects and has restored several D.W. Griffith movies from the director's original prints. The company also performs preservation work on modern films. Contact : John E. Allen at (570) 676-4145.
Cineric Inc., New York Cineric is an optical and digital post house that offers digital restoration and photo-chemical services. Among the digital services is a proprietary, PC-based, digital film-analysis service called the Single Pass System, which uses a computer to sample and analyze film frames and create color-corrected answer prints of those frames. Cineric is heavily investing in digital techniques, and company engineers are currently working to develop an automated, digital restoration process, as well as making certain restoration services available remotely via the Internet. The company also collaborates on traditional optical jobs with all the major labs around the New York area. In recent years, Cineric has restored several Ray Harryhausen effects' films, including Seven Voyages of Sinbad, for which the company performed digital color-restoration work using a proprietary process that involved matte creation to replace faded colors. Contact : Balazs Nyari or Tom Heitman at (212) 586-4822.
Cinesite Inc., Los Angeles Cinesite's film-restoration division focuses exclusively on digital repair work for projects that are damaged beyond photo-chemical help. In recent years, the company has worked with photo-chemical restoration facilities on projects including Rear Window, Vertigo, and four reels of the original Fantasia. Cinesite also performed the first digital restoration of an entire feature film in the early 1990s, for the rerelease of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. On that project, Cinesite used proprietary software and its Kodak Lightning scanner to repair and color-correct the images. The company's digital restoration department is now built around Kodak Lightning Laser film recorder and scanning technology for film-to-digital and digital-to-film conversions. Contact: Rick Utley at (323) 468-4457.
Cinetech Inc., Valencia, California Cinetech is one of the country's few film labs dedicated solely to film restoration and preservation. The company, which recently moved into a new 40,000 square-foot facility in Valencia after 10 years in Burbank, focuses mainly on photo-chemical work, although it does work in partnership with other facilities on projects that require a combination of photo-chemical and digital repair. In addition to partnering with Pacific Title on Disney's Nothing Sacred restoration, Cinetech recently restored Easy Rider and is currently working on Blade Runner. Contact: David Cipes at (661) 222-9073.
Film Technology Company, Inc., Hollywood Film Technology, a 30-year-old restoration and preservation lab, specializes in photo-chemical and photo-mechanical restoration work on 35mm and 16mm projects. The company builds its own customized film printers to handle rare films and recently instituted a program to perform 8mm conversions to 16mm and 35mm. Film Technology was involved in the recent Citizen Kane restoration and has worked on hundreds of other feature films. But the company has also developed a niche focusing on historical newsreels, private films, and independent projects. Contact: Allen Stark at (323) 464-3456.
FotoKem Film and Video, Burbank FotoKem is a full-service film laboratory that has served Hollywood for over 35 years. The company's film-restoration division offers photo-chemical cleanup and repair for both black-and-white and color films and digital scratch removal and restoration using Celco film recorder technology. The company is currently working on Steven Spielberg's Duel, among other projects. Contact: David Whitten at (818) 846-3101, extension 525.
Pacific Title & Art Studio, Hollywood Over 75 years old, Pacific Title is the oldest operating optical house in Hollywood. The company's film-restoration division offers photo-chemical services, in conjunction with major industry labs, and digital restoration services. The company specializes in recombining optical elements to make duplicate negatives, interpositives, or black-and-white fine grains, among other services. On the digital side, Pacific Title has full scanning and recording facilities and frequently works on 4K resolution projects. The company works with both four-perf and Vistavision 35mm film, as well as 65mm projects. Most recently, Pacific Title has been involved with the large-format restoration of 2001: A Space Odyssey and the creation of mastering elements for Around the World in 80 Days. Contact : Phil Feiner at (323) 464-0121. Triage Motion Picture Services, Hollywood Triage is one of the newer facilities in the film-restoration game, featuring several staff members who came over from 4MC's now-closed film-restoration department. The company specializes in photo-chemical work in both 16mm and 35mm, on everything from early nitrates to format conversions to modern film preservation work. Triage recently restored How Green is My Valley, Power and the Glory, and All the King's Men. Contact: Paul Rutan Jr. or Tony Munroe at (323) 962-7420
Western Cine Film & Video, Englewood, Colorado Western Cine specializes in photo-chemical film restorations on old black-and-white films, repairing negatives, moving old nitrates to newer film stocks, and creating new negatives, interpositives, fine grains, and prints. The company recently worked on Disney's Spiral Staircase restoration. Contact: Rick Wade at (303) 783-1020.
WRS Motion Picture & Video Laboratory, Pittsburgh WRS is one of the oldest labs on the East Coast and now performs both photo-chemical restoration and digital recombination and cleanup work on problem frames. WRS works on color and black-and-white jobs, and, over the last year, has restored Night of the Living Dead and Stepford Wives, among other projects. Contact: David Simpson at (412) 937-7700.
YCM, Burbank YCM owns a lab in Henderson, Nevada, which does all its black-and-white processing work, while the company's headquarters in Burbank concentrates on photo-chemical restoration work. The company specializes in restoring old nitrates and early color projects, strictly in the 35mm format. YCM also works with major studios to preserve recent films. YCM performed the photo-chemical restorations of Touch of Evil and the original Star Wars trilogy, and is currently working on Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Contact: Richard Dayton at (818) 843-5300.
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