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MillimeterThe HD Bomb
Feb 1, 2005 12:00 PM, Michael Goldman
When visual effects veteran Peter Kuran produced, directed, and released a documentary on the history of the atomic bomb called Trinity and Beyond: The Atomic Bomb Movie in 1995, he relied heavily on archival footage to tell his tale. At the time, Kuran used a combination of optical printing, photochemical color correction and restoration procedures, digital scanning, and output techniques to make the vintage footage sufficiently presentable on a big screen.
Archival footage of the Cherokee Event, the detonation of a 3.8 megaton H-Bomb on May 20, 1956. The shot typifies the material being digitally restored by Kuran.
The project helped Kuran later earn a 2001 Academy Sci-Tech Award for inventing the Restored Color Image (RCI) process for restoring faded color negatives. Kuran originally developed RCI in order to color correct specific sections of Trinity and Beyond and recently began licensing it to various restoration facilities.
To commemorate the 60th anniversary of the bomb tests, Kuran has taken his documentary to HD for an upcoming DVD rerelease, as well as for possible future HD television broadcasts. He recently brought the movie's original negative to Technicolor Creative Services, Hollywood, for a 35mm-to-HD transfer and is currently digitally restoring sections of the film himself.
“Technicolor transferred the movie on their Spirit Datacine and a Panasonic HD D5 recorder and did some color correction on their Da Vinci 2K Plus system,” says Kuran. “We recorded it to D5 in 4:4:4 color space. Since we did that, I've noticed that the original cleanup job we did 10 years ago does not always hold up well in the HD world. Even with digital video noise-reduction capabilities, there are a lot of artifacts that turned up for the first time when we went to HD. The HD really shows incredible detail, but it also shows more flaws, and now we need to fix them. Therefore, we are currently in the process of going back to some of our original scans and taking them directly to digital files to replace what we had originally. Through this process, we can get the best of those scans without taking the images through more generations.”
Kuran says he is doing “QC, touch-up work, and shot replacements on one, huge, uncompressed 800GB QuickTime movie, transferred by Technicolor onto a terabyte drive. It will probably take me about a month using off-the-shelf tools such as Commotion, After Effects, and Photoshop, and then we'll re-input the movie through Technicolor's system and create a new HD D5 master.”
Kuran adds that certain black-and-white sections of the film held up better to the transfer to HD than others, depending on original source material.
“Whenever we had access to black-and-white original negatives, instead of taking them to fine grains, we took them to interpositives instead,” says Kuran. “We found that the black and white held up better grain-wise when we took it to interpositive stock, rather than a fine-grain stock.”
Kuran says he is also proud of how one particular section, featuring color archival footage from the years 1957 to 1959, held up on the HD transfer. That was the section of the film that relied most heavily on the RCI process. Kuran says that work “remains in good shape.”
“Remember, the history of the atomic bomb covered in film clips relates to the history of film itself during that same period,” he says. “The early part of the film relies heavily, for instance, on 35mm black-and-white stock. Then it goes to 16mm color, usually Kodachrome. Then in the mid-‘50s, it was mainly Eastman color 35mm stock. That is the area where you notice most of the problems in terms of color fading. Originally, we improved on those faded color negatives using the RCI process. This time, for the HD version during the telecine process, we saw that those images had not faded because we had already applied a process to keep the color vibrant. This time the challenge was mainly about how many generations we were going to deal with in certain sections and dealing with new flaws in places that were not visible until we transferred everything to the HD format.”
