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www.postmagazine.com 35 POST NOVEMBER 2015 Inferno repaired torn scenes. Digital Vision's Phoenix and HS-Art's Diamant eliminated flicker and stabilized image movement. The Foundry's Nuke was used to combine original negative and the Y-layer separation master, and align them in perfect registration. To reign in fading color, the team went back to the original 8-perf negative and the Y-layer separation master. "What was once a photochemical process is now a digital process building back in color lost to fading," says Schade. "Today's preci- sion in compositing images gives us a bigger palette, a bigger toolbox to draw out the maximum amount of information from the film elements at our disposal." DaVinci Resolve was the color tool of choice for the restoration. One of the color issues they encountered involved balancing color layers. "When you replace the yellow dye in the negative with the yellow separation master, the magenta layer beneath could be down 15 to 25 percent and the cyan layer down 5 to 7 percent," Harris explains. "The nat- ural balance of the three layers is off. So colorist Michael Holgate had to be very aware of the other dye layers and how the fading interacted with the replace- ment layer running at 100 percent." "It took a lot of effort to get the color where it should be," Schade agrees. "We also had to make sure the records lined up absolutely perfectly or we'd see little fringes of color on the hard edges. There was a lot of image manipulation of up- down, left-right and 3D warping to align everything perfectly." "And they were dead-on perfect," Harris chimes in. That labor-intensive process was performed at StudioPost, MTI Film and Prasad Digital. StudioPost's audio team accessed the six-track from the previous resto- ration and cleaned up ticks and pops. They also panned effects and music stems to fill two more channels and deliver 7.1 audio for the first time in the film's history. "In some of the surrounds, hiss swelled up and down in the music track," Schade says. "We used Cedar Cambridge NR-5 and iZotope RX 4 Advanced Studio to even them out so they weren't so obtrusive." Harris says that reviewers have high- lighted "the clarity of the audio we have now." Andrea Aguirre spearheaded the audio team. "There was never a time in the resto- ration process when someone said, 'No, we can't do that,'" Harris recalls. "Our philosophy is to retain the filmmakers' vision and not over-use the tools," says Schade. "We don't want to change the intent or the look. For Spartacus we wanted to recreate exactly what Stanley [Kubrick] and Kirk [Douglas] saw in 1960." THE CIVIL WAR It seems hard to believe that Ken Burns' epic nine-part documentary series, The Civil War, is celebrating its 25th anni- versary. Before its rebroadcast on PBS and its Blu-ray release in September, the series underwent a 4K restoration at Technicolor PostWorks New York (www. technicolorpwny.com) that brought the iconic documentary back to life for its fans and a new generation of viewers. Fortunately, the series, which was shot on 16mm film, had been "meticu- lously archived at the George Eastman House, so it was in great condition," says Ben Murray, vice president of creative services at Technicolor PostWorks. George Eastman House and Technicolor PostWorks shared the task of scanning, frame-by-frame, 50,000 feet of original negative using identical ArriScan film scanners at 4K resolution. Murray (inset) led the Technicolor PostWorks 4K restoration of Ken Burns' The Civil War (above and opposite page). The top, restored image offers a crisper, sharper Lincoln. Schade (inset) worked closely with archivist Harris to give Spartacus its 4K restoration. The "before" (top) and "after" (below).