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November 2011

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ation The World At War: Dubbs/Eyeframe restored 26 episodes, plus 11 hours of bonus footage. the material," he notes. "It took us about two months of metaphorically holding the images to the light to see what we had." Technicolor used a B&W print of A Trip to the Moon that Bromberg owned for reference lining up the color fragments and full frames to build the movie. "It was a Frankenstein kind of approach," Burton admits. "In some cases there were several versions of a frame or pieces of frames where Serge had unfolded the film enough to make an internegative on an optical printer or scan it at the French film archives." Once this timeline was established, the "serious" work of restoration could begin, he says. Technicolor realigned the images, rid them of flicker and cleaned them a bit — "not too much — we didn't want to remove artifacts that were part of the film, like splice lines in the middle of frames. The frames were individu- ally hand painted back then, typically by teams of women, and you often see the thumb print of the woman who did the work." In portions of the film where the color elements had disintegrated too much to rescue, a B&W print from the Méliès estate, housed in the French film archives, was scanned and digitally painted to match the less-than-perfect original. One of the biggest tasks was structuring the workflow, Burton reports. "Figuring out what steps to do in what order was a big challenge. We couldn't repair the physical damage until everything was in the same state of being. We did musical- chairs block diagrams of the workflow and ended up essentially working both ends to the middle: We assembled color fragments to match the existing B&W, but also adjusted the B&W to match sections where we found color frames where no B&W remained in the reference print." Technicolor has numerous toolsets for restoration work. "No single tool can solve all problems, so we have them all," says Burton, citing Digital Vision DVO Phoenix, MTI Film's Correct DRS, Pixel Farm's PFClean, Adobe After Effects, Autodesk Smoke, plus custom grain management and digital noise reduction software and proprietary software for color work. The restored color version of A Trip to the Moon premiered at the Cannes Film Festival last spring, about eight months after Technicolor began reviewing Brom- berg and Lange's elements. Technicolor created a number of digital cinema ver- sions for film festivals worldwide, and parts of A Trip to the Moon, as well as other Méliès films from Bromberg's collection, are woven into Martin Scorsese's upcom- ing Hugo, in which Ben Kingsley plays an elderly Méliès. Burton gives kudos to the Technicolor Foundation, a non-profit entity founded vidual frames and broken pieces of the original elements. They stored the data on hard drives for eight years, waiting for technology to catch up with their needs. With the substantial financial assistance of the Technicolor Foundation for Cin- ema Heritage, headed by director Severine Wemaere, and the Groupama Gan Foundation for Cinema, headed by director Gilles Duval, restoration finally got underway in 2010. From Bromberg and Lange came "a bucket of digital shards" for Technicolor: the hard drives loaded with their collection of files "captured with different cam- eras, different light sources — TIFFs, JPEGs, Targas, some files we couldn't identify," Burton says. Shot randomly from the disintegrating film, "there was no order to in 2006 active in the field of preservation and promotion of film and audio visual heritage, and Groupama Gan Foundation for stepping up to the plate to make restoration possible for this key early film. "It's one thing for a Hollywood studio to put up the money to restore a library classic for limited theatrical release or Blu-ray," he says. "It's another for foundations to act for the sake of film heritage." THE WORLD AT WAR The groundbreaking, epic The World At War documentary series aired on British television in 1973 and subsequently met with international acclaim. London-based Dubbs|Eyeframe (www.dubbs-eyeframe.co.uk) has restored the show's 26 epi- sodes plus 11 hours of extras, some never seen before, for FreemantleMedia for eventual rebroadcast in HD and Blu-ray release. Fortunately, the mammoth restoration came about at the same time that Snell sought a big-volume project to beta test Archangel Ph.C-HD, its advanced HD and SD realtime restoration system. Eyeframe worked closely with Snell's R&D team during the year-long restoration incorporating upgrades and improvements to the system as they became available. "We went back and looked at the original negatives and prints for The World At War as well as a set of IPs, which were made for a previous VHS and DVD release and were perfect to use as a benchmark," says Eyeframe's head of restora- tion, Simon Marbrook. "Whenever possible we used the original mag tracks for the new 5.1 track. We were preserving the series for posterity, so it was very important that we did it right." The facility has used many Snell products over the years, and Marbrook had "every confidence" that Archangel HD would be robust enough to tackle the project. "The Archangel HD that's on the market today was honed over the course of The World At War," he notes. "Working on the series we encountered every possible problem. As a realtime system, Archangel HD offered the ideal solution: We could see what we had straightaway and make immediate decisions how far to push things." The major issue with the doc series was the array of archival source materials, all with different types of grain — newsreel and 'home movie' footage from peace- time and wartime that went back to the turn of the 20th Century and included rare color footage. Marbrook found the usual tears, hairs and splice jumps to clean up, smooth out and stabilize. "We tried to remain true to the sources but improve the quality without introducing new digital artifacts," he explains. "We left a fair bit of the grain so the images didn't look artificial." Considerable time was given to grading the footage, especially color clips of Hitler shot by Eva Braun and two-tone footage of an early Nazi rally; for the latter Marbrook sought input from the original series editors who could provide advice about what the footage looked like when they worked with it. Some of the 11 hours of extras had to be re-cut to match the DVD material. Among the bonus material is an episode, "Warrior," which didn't air when the series was telecast. "It was quite unique and haunting," says Marbrook. "People from both sides of the war talking about their personal experiences with interview footage overlaid with graphic images — some of them too graphic for 1970's TV." In total 140,000 fixes were required for The World At War. "We individually painted out 3.5 million pieces of dirt," Marbrook reports. Archangel HD was deployed for about 80 percent of the fixes; MTI Film's Correct DRS came in for the balance of the work. Eyeframe output 4x3 and pan-and-scan versions of the series. Head of audio James Nardi oversaw the audio restoration and created the 5.1 www.postmagazine.com Post • November 2011 37

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