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MillimeterRestoration for Blu-ray
Aug 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Michael Goldman
A Fistful of Dollars undergoes additional video restoration work for Blu-ray release.
Among the restoration trends appearing in the modern era of digital home entertainment is a focus on doing niche video restoration work on classic movies to improve and tailor them for specific new home deliverable formats that are suddenly adding value to film properties sitting in studio vaults. Sergio Leone’s classic Spaghetti Western A Fistful of Dollars, starring Clint Eastwood, is a case in point. The movie underwent a major restoration in 2005 for a new DVD release, and then, this year, it underwent additional video restoration work specifically for a new, upcoming Blu-ray release from Fox (which owns domestic Blu-ray format distribution rights to the MGM movie).
The Blu-ray restoration work for the release was performed at HTV/Illuminate, a Hollywood-based post facility. Jim Hardy, CEO and president of HTV/Illuminate, says the project was restored specifically for the Blu-ray release and has no long-term bearing on any other releases or versions.
“There are two different approaches restoration for older films for today’s markets,” Hardy says. “First is a total film restoration process where you create a new negative, and second is a video restoration which is usually in an HD format. A video restoration project is a more economic approach to restoring older movies. There is a big cost difference between the two. It can cost studios several hundreds of thousands of dollars to restore an original film negative, depending on the extent of the restoration. To perform a digital restoration in HD is a more economic value and a much quicker process. In today’s high-definition home video market for both Blu-ray and HD DVD, all of the flaws are much more pronounced because of the image resolution. Studios and independent distributors have to maintain a high quality of product to encourage consumers to buy their product. But financially, they can't go back and restore the original negative for each new release they are dealing with, so this process is becoming increasingly important to them. With these specific releases, it’s quite profitable and effective to perform a video restoration and release that new version into the HD video market.”
That process, in this case, involved HTV/Illuminate first taking receipt of the movie on HDCAM-SR tape—material transferred from a 35mm inter-positive film element at Deluxe, Hollywood, Calif.—and then digitizing that material onto its network. The company then focused on manually fixing a series of flaws, including scratches, tears, and chemical stains, using a combination of the MTI Correct DRS software system and some proprietary restoration tools designed to handle flicker issues and other problems on specific shots.
“We had a number of artists working on the project, and most of it was more of an artistic challenge for them,” Hardy says. “Removing a variety of chemical stains, dirt, and tears is routine with the power of the software that we have, but the bigger challenge involved smoothing the color balance between the opticals. All of these problems are challenging because of the duration and type of movement going on during scenes, so bringing it all together was really the big challenge.
