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RESTORING FILMMAKERS' VISIONS www.postmagazine.com 36 POST NOVEMBER 2015 The entire documentary was then re-edited on Avid Media Composer by restoration producer Daniel J. White, who worked under the guidance of Paul Barnes, who cut the original series on a Steenbeck. White reproduced every cut and dissolve, a massive job considering that episode one had about 1,000 cuts. The restoration team at Technicolor PostWorks marshaled the skills of art- ists, editors and producers for the three- month project. "The process needed to be fluid, collaborative and spontaneous," says Murray. "We scribbled flowcharts on napkins." The first automated dust pass was done with Digital Vision's Nucoda (formerly Nucoda FilmMaster); manual dust removal was done with Blackmagic Design's DaVinci Revival. After these steps were taken, new issues revealed themselves. The biggest challenge were images that were bob- bing and weaving throughout the series. "Everything had a weave in it. It was there from the start, even in the last remaster- ing," says Murray. "We stabilized a couple of shots, then realized we had to do every frame to the level of contemporary HD QC standards and within an unmovable time frame set by the PBS telecast." Technicolor PostWorks determined how to scale the massive stabilization job, creating a collaborative workflow with "more systems, more bodies, more hours" devoted to it, he says. The entire process remained in-house at the facility and was done on Nucoda; the manufacturer "brought in an expert to give us advice on what we could try," Murray recalls. Lower thirds and other graphic elements from the original had to be entirely replaced. To recreate those titles, small segments of negative used to produce the original optical effects were located at George Eastman House and in a painstaking search through unlabeled containers at a film storage vault. Color grading was done by Jack Lewars on Autodesk Lustre. "We stayed true to the 1990 broadcast masters that we used as reference, but we were able to bring out a lot more detail, especially in the faces and the guns," says Murray. "We all made the creative decision to en- hance the images while remaining true to the original intent. There's an immediacy to the picture that wasn't there before. We wiped off the softness of NTSC that dated the series to 1990, and it's now pretty intense to watch." The restoration also gained about 10 percent image area on the left and right sides of the 16mm frame, creating a 1:43 aspect ratio within a 16:9 frame. Now viewers can see people who were previ- ously cropped out of the shots. The initial conform, final finishing and final QC pass were done in Autodesk Flame Premium. The facility customized the system with a fast 4K SAN, which en- abled three streams of uncompressed 4K playback for multitasking. Data manage- ment was a major challenge throughout the restoration. The 4K files for the series comprised more than 110TBs of data; more than 25TBs had to be kept live at any one time. MY FAIR LADY The very busy Robert A. Harris returned to My Fair Lady last year for a new $1 million restoration lead- ing to a limited theatrical engage- ment, which began in October, and the 50th anniversary Blu-ray and DVD Combo Pack release from CBS Home Entertainment and Paramount Home Media Distribution. Harris led the previ- ous restoration of the Academy Award- winning classic musical in 1994. "Ken Ross at CBS understood the val- ue of the elements and pushed for the restoration," he says. "Twenty years later, with 4K digital restoration, we could fix the optical holes in the separation masters and the registration problems we couldn't afford to fix before. Thanks to funding from CBS and the Academy, we could make a 65mm record negative and a new 70mm answer print, fully color corrected, so the film is protected going forward." FotoKem's LA headquarters (www.fo tokem.com) was tasked with the project. "They're great; I think they're the best in the business," Harris says. "FotoKem has people with incredible backgrounds in analog and digital that you can't find anywhere else." After the original color negative and 65mm separation masters were inspect- ed, FotoKem began scanning at 8K archival resolution to LTO 5 tape in late December 2013. The restoration was a 4K process; all of the color correction and dirt clean up was done in 4K Rec 709. Colorist Mark Griffith, manning Resolve, corrected fading, which had oc- curred after the previous restoration. "In 1994 the negative had faded, especially the yellow dye layer," says Harris. "We were able to bring everything back, but now it had faded even more. That was still correctible, but there was also dif- ferential fading at the splices: You could see color bumping the head and tail of many shots. Mark was a genius — he got the color for the middle of the shot to balance with the head and tail. And he did this on a frame-by-frame basis over a five-month period." Harris notes that, "When you start digging deep into the original negative of that era, you see things that weren't meant to be seen." For example, in shots of Cockney flower seller Eliza Doolittle, where Audrey Hepburn is caught with her mouth wide open, her dental work didn't seem up to 21st century standards. Harris (inset), who also worked on restoring Spartacus, led the $1M restoration of My Fair Lady and created a fully color corrected 4K version of the classic.