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Restoration meant we were essentially doing four restora- tions — it was a very painstaking process." Who better to undertake such a painstak- ing process than a company that's been in the restoration business for almost two decades and has developed a suite of soft- ware tools used by facilities worldwide. "We recognized the unique problems of 4K resto- ration and developed new software, Auto- Clean, which in its initial iteration was designed to see only very small amounts of dirt and automatically fix it with our DRS replacement technology," says Chernoff. The AutoClean feature undoubtedly made clean ups on Taxi Driver easier. "As it was, it took about 2,000 man hours of work." MTI Film's DRS software also realigned or de-warped the image on each splice, cor- recting distortions inherent with splices on the original negative. Another recent 4K restoration involved Sony Pictures' Ethan Chase worked on the foreign language audio for the Hart to Hart series. track in one of Eyeframe's Pro Tools suites. "It made a remarkable difference at the end of the day how much we were able to clean up Sir Laurence Olivier's narration and bring it to the foreground," says Marbrook. "Our cli- ent, Sir Jeremy Isaacs, said it felt like he was back in the same room with Olivier." Since finishing The World At War, Eye- frame's Archangel HD system has been used to restore a DVD boxed set of films directed by the late Andrei Tarkovsky as well as Sam Peckinpah's 1971 Straw Dogs. TAXI DRIVER Last year Hollywood's MTI Film (www. mtifilm.com) participated in the 35th anni- versary restoration of Martin Scorsese's landmark film, Taxi Driver. Sony Colorworks handled the color correction; Grover Crisp supervised the restoration process. Responsible for digital cleaning and fixing, MTI Film received a scan of the picture that Cineric New York made from the original negative. "The negative wasn't too battered; it had normal wear and tear, dirt and scratches," says MTI Film CEO Larry Chernoff. "But this was a 4K restoration, and Grover has a very discerning eye. He requires a pristine picture." He explains that very small particles of dirt are hard to see in 4K restorations. "The moni- toring is not designed to show pixel-by-pixel relationships at 4K, so we had to work in quad- rants for a 1:1 representation of each pixel. That 38 Post • November 2011 the parody spy films, Our Man Flint (1966) and In Like Flint (1967) from Fox. Image Trends in Austin, TX, scanned the original negatives; MTI Film color corrected the pictures and output them to film and HDCAM SR for preserva- tion and Blu-ray release. Chernoff says the original negatives had the usual defects of age along with "lots of torn frames," which were mended with MTI Film's Correct DRS. "It can reconstruct a frame by interpolating frames from those before and after and, by using our paint tool, borrow pixels from adjacent frames. Some work was automated, some required manual intervention." MTI Film devoted four months to the pair of films. While advanced and sophisticated, auto- mated solutions can only do so much, Cher- noff reminds us. "We've been at this nearly 20 years, and certain others in the field have been doing this for a while, too. If we as an industry could have cracked the automation issue, we would have by now. It's a very com- plex problem: So much in the content of each frame can confound automation. It imperative creating automation can't always discern a specular highlight or glint that only lasts one frame. But the human eye can. "So while we recognize the economic in that reduces the amount of manual labor, realisti- cally improvements are incremental." MTI Film went back to the post-war era to restore 12 O'Clock High, the 1949 film starring Gregory Peck, for Blu-ray release. The short turnaround — just six weeks — was a challenge, especially since the original negative was nowhere to be found. "We used B&W prints off dupe negs and dupes of dupes — we had five different ele- ments for the whole film and had to go through everything to determine which was www.postmagazine.com the best, down to the scene level," says Cher- noff. "Sometimes the film was so spotted with vinegar syndrome that it wasn't until we looked at the last element that we found something usable." Dealing with B&W film poses its own challenges, he adds. "It requires a different sensibility in terms of color correction, and there are some differences in how the auto- mation works." VICTOR NUNEZ FILMS Goldcrest Post Productions in New York City (www.goldcrestpost.com) recently com- pleted a trio of restorations for Florida-based director Victor Nunez, a professor at Florida State University and a founding member of The Independent Feature Project. The three films span a 14-year period in the filmmaker's history and encompass Gal Young 'Un, his feature debut (1979); A Flash of Green, starring Ed Harris and Blair Brown (1985); and Ruby in Paradise, which starred Ashley Judd in her first leading role (1993). The first two films' restoration was commis- sioned by IFC for theatrical release and TV broadcast; Nunez himself commissioned the restoration of Ruby in Paradise. Gal Young 'Un was shot on regular 16mm film, which posed challenges for the process. Using Arri's Arriscan pin-registered scanner, Goldcrest worked out perforation hole-based image stabilization for all the film's cut points. Running Kodak's Digital ICE scratch correction software "hugely lessened the time required for dust busting," reports managing director Tim Spitzer. "It automatically takes care of minute particulate dirt. Then after scanning at 3K to 2K, we did manual dust busting, con- formed the film in our Quantel iQ, color cor- rected it and output files for film recording and the HDCAM SR master." Spitzer was involved in the S16mm blow -up of A Flash of Green 25 years ago. He remembers at the time that the blow-up couldn't reproduce the golden-yellow Flori- da light that Nunez had captured. "He was never able to get what we wanted in the blow-up, but now our Arri scanner is so flat and neutral that we could immediately come up with the color palette he had photo- graphed. We were finally able to achieve the look he wanted." The restoration of Ruby in Paradise was similar to A Flash of Green, with the additional challenge of thousands of minute green specks built into the original negative and S16mm blow-up. "They weren't extremely obvious on the screen but they were on a high-resolution video monitor," says Spitzer. "We calibrated Cinnafilm's Dark Energy tool-