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MillimeterOn the Frontier
Oct 1, 2002 12:00 PM, By Jon Silberg
Using New Technology on Old Movies
 The second restoration of On the Waterfront replaced the tears on the original negative (top) with a print identical to DP Boris Kaufman’s original vision (bottom). |
Film restoration is still relatively young as a science and younger still as a viable business. It was only a decade ago that Grover Crisp, Sony Pictures' vice president of asset management and film preservation, attempted a complete restoration of Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront, one of the many cinematic gems then recently acquired for Sony's library. This groundbreaking feature, with Oscar-winning cinematography by Boris Kaufman, had deteriorated from its original splendor. Unlike many films, it hadn't turned to dust or entirely disintegrated: There were still elements that could generate a marginally acceptable print. At that time, however, it would not have been possible to strike a print identical to the one seen on the movie's opening night in 1954.
Mishandling and overprinting had caused image degradation in On the Waterfront's original negatives and the best remaining printing elements. Scratched, torn, and faded sections of original negative frequently had been replaced with hastily struck footage. For the restoration, Crisp searched out the best possible elements — reel-by-reel, shot-by-shot — and a small film lab in Burbank, Calif., called Cinetech used optical printing and chemical processes to create a wholly restored negative. This new negative was designed to be used to strike prints and videotapes or be repurposed in ways unimaginable in 1992.
Since the initial restoration of On the Waterfront, film restoration techniques have greatly advanced, and additional companies have begun to offer restoration services. Restoration of old titles has become common both at Sony and, to varying degrees, other studios. With DVD and various video-on-demand (VOD) formats available, content owners, “realize that virtually any title they own is up for grabs in terms of repurposing,” says Crisp. “There is a whole market out there that people didn't think about when I started doing this.”
In 1992, Cinetech's film restoration specialty was a niche business. Since then, the company has progressed into a 40,000-square-foot, full-service color and B&W photochemical motion-picture lab based in Valencia, Calif., employing 70 people — including 10 traditional color timers — who work on an average of 250 titles per year for studios, museums, and archives. Labs like Cinetech have incorporated digital tools into their restoration arsenal — tools Crisp used when he tackled a new restoration of On the Waterfront this fall. Bad tears, printing, and chemical damage that had been impossible to repair the first time could now be fixed using digital technology.
“We're just getting our feet wet with digital technology now,” says Joseph A. Olivier, Cinetech's vice president in charge of restoration. Cinetech performs the actual digital manipulation in house, as well as the film printing and processing, but outsources the scanning and recording to facilities like Digital FilmWorks (Los Angeles) and Cinesite (Hollywood). “At this point,” Olivier says, “there really isn't a good reason for us to get into the scanning and recording business. That equipment becomes obsolete so fast we'd rather have somebody else own it.”
According to Crisp, Sony Pictures and Sony corporate are very enlightened about the value of investing in the restoration of their library, regardless of whether or not a particular title offers an immediate marketing opportunity. Crisp oversees special restorations, such as Lawrence of Arabia for its special 40th anniversary theatrical rerelease, but he also has a budget to restore almost every film in the vaults. His budget, however, is not unlimited, so the digital realm is only a last resort.
 Athough most of their restoration work is optical and lab-based, Cinetech used digital tools, such as After Effects, for some alterations including cloning frames. |
The resolution of each scan is something that must be carefully thought out. A 4K, rather than 2K scan, is sometimes a necessary expense, but most often is a luxury he cannot justify. “When we go into a digital environment, the most important thing is that it should be imperceptible,” says Crisp. “What matters most is how the digitally altered frames and shots cut together with everything else. There are times when a 2K scan is perfectly acceptable.”
There are many factors that determine how important it is to scan at 4K, according to Daniel Longfellow, lead digital restorer at Cinetech. “The condition of the scenes, the lens they were shot with, the film that it was shot with, and the way it was initially processed can all affect the resolution of the image.”
Longellow explains that once the frames are scanned as Cineon files, his digital-restoration department brings these files into Mac G4 workstations — running OS X with Jaguar — with LaCie FireWire 80GB hard drives. Most of the actual work is done in Adobe After Effects 5.5, which supports work at a color depth of 16bits/channel. “These are huge files,” says Longfellow. “They run 46 to 72 megs per frame — depending on whether they're 2K or 4K scans.”
When a portion of a frame is torn, scratched, or otherwise damaged, the restoration team compares that frame to those that precede and follow, and then clone those frames for the damaged area. After Effects has been very successful for this type of work. “We tried [Adobe] Photoshop,” Longfellow recalls, “and it turned out we were making pretty [still] pictures, but when you would look at a whole shot, it didn't look very good.”
One reason for this “is older films generally have grain that's much larger than it is on modern films,” says Longfellow. “When you hold an image static — say you cut an area of the background from four frames back and paste that in to replace a damaged portion of the frame — you'll see the grain become static. So, although I could make these pictures that looked great in Photoshop, it wouldn't work in relationship to the next frame. After Effects is lined up to let you flash back and forth between frames. It allows the user to have a better interface for doing exactly this type of work.”
Longfellow uses Photoshop in conjunction with After Effects if he has to create a master digital matte to cover the background of a large area. “In that situation,” Longfellow explains, “I would create the matte in Photoshop and import that into After Effects to fine-tune everything.”
 In the production room at Cinetech, technicians inspect the original studio elements of the films to assess film base, shrinkage, and length of the film. |
The appearance of grain can be reduced digitally, but involves alteration rather than restoration. In order to smooth the grain pattern, Longfellow makes use of software from Digital Film Tools (DFT), a subsidiary company of Digital FilmWorks. “DFT [software] lets you apply a grain layer to the whole piece,” Longfellow says. “If you try to apply a grain pattern to a small area, it wouldn't look right.”
Crisp recently finished the second restoration of On the Waterfront. The new elements can be used to strike prints, an HD version, a DVD version, or any other format. But the task of restoring Sony's library is far from complete. “We're dealing with decades worth of material where people had no idea that that films had an afterlife, where nobody had any long-range plan.”
Crisp is optimistic that today's studio films will not end up in similar condition. “I'm not aware of anyone not taking care of film elements,” Crisp says. “People understand the need to store them in conditions with the right temperature and humidity. Sony has three cold-storage units spread out over the country, and I know the studio makes every effort to make proper elements. I think everybody today knows how important it is to make YCM B&W separation masters and store them correctly.”
Crisp's meticulous attitude is typical of people involved in film restoration, where the work is more than a business. With the growing demand for films in various digital formats such as DVD and HD, this labor of love is becoming increasingly viable from both a business and technical standpoint. Improved lab processing techniques and powerful digital tools will give new life to films that might otherwise be lost, a benefit that is clear to Longfellow. “We're working on a piece of history,” he says. “It's a tremendous kick for me to be part of that, to be able to say ‘I worked on On the Waterfront.’”
Preserving Video
When the makers of the documentary Dogtown and Z-Boys saw a theatrical release in the movie's future, they found themselves up against an increasingly common challenge. The film's material was originated in a variety of formats — 16mm and Super 8 film, and various standard-def flavors of video — mastered using Avid, complete with composites, speed-ups, and slow-downs, then output to standard 30 frame/60 field-per-second Digital Beta video. The team had a finished product for which the creative decisions had all been made, but getting it out to film would be a complex procedure.
 Restored film is developed in Cinetech’s processing department. Two B&W, two color negative, and two color positive machines are used to process the film. |
The project would have to be converted into a 24fps format so it could be transferred to motion-picture film and projected to theatrical audiences. The editor, Paul Crowder, along with producer Agi Orsi and director Stacy Peralta, considered a number of approaches, hoping to get a result that could be projected on film at 24fps, yet look like the Digital Betacam version. Because their original source material had been captured at different frame rates, transferred to video (film material using a 3:2 pull-down), and then subjected to speed manipulation in Avid, traditional tape-to-film transfer could yield blurry, streaky artifacts. The filmmakers turned to Sonic Foundry (Santa Monica, Calif.).
Founded in 1991 by Monty Schmidt and Curt Palmer, Sonic Foundry established itself as a media software company offering prosumer editing packages, such as an audio mixer called ACID and non-linear video editing system Vegas Video. The company also developed a proprietary technology ToonFIT, which has been used for The Simpsons and King of the Hill. ToonFIT smoothes out some of the motion artifacts that can be introduced when animation is originally shot on twos and then subjected to a 3:2 pull-down. By using this technology to reconstruct frames out of fields, ToonFIT allows the movement on the final video output to appear smoother than it would otherwise.
Sonic Foundry advanced this frame interpolation technology and developed C2 and 60/24, proprietary algorithms that construct a 24fps images out of 60fps video. “We remove redundant frames, repair the 3:2 pull-down and build new frames out of the fields,” says Caranza. In the case of Dogtown, the company output the new frames to D5 tape in the 1080 24p format. Finally, the D5 was sent to another facility for a frame-to-frame, tape-to-film transfer.
Richard Greenberg, Sonic Foundry Media Services' vice president of business development, believes that Sonic Foundry's services and software are important for preservation of video content. “Right now film is the only archival medium,” Greenberg says. “People talk about the shelf life of video as being ten years more or less. We learned a lot with 2” with oxide coming off the tape. There have been improvements since then, but film negative is still the only truly archival medium. Quality loss is a big problem in converting some of that material. Sonic Foundry can help solve those problems.”
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.
