Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/910366
www.postmagazine.com 28 POST NOVEMBER 2017 RESTORATION 4K restoration was overseen by Romero, who sadly died last July, and the film's original producers, Russ and Gary Streiner, and co-writer (with Romero), John Russo. The Museum of Modern Art had a print of the film in its collection, and Katie Trainor, manager of the Film Collection, spent two years seeking the cooper- ation of the film's creators in the restoration effort. "The Streiners had original elements in their homes," she says. "But they didn't want to risk ship- ping elements, so they drove from Pittsburgh to our restoration facility in Hamlin, Pennsylvania to donate the elements to the museum. We were very fortu- nate to have the Streiners and George and his wife, Suzanne, as partners. The restoration was special for George: We showed the film in the museum's theater in 1969 or 1970, and we showed the restored film in the same theater almost 50 years later. It's one of the first horror films we've invested in for a significant restoration." The 4K restoration was scanned from the Streiners' original camera negative. "It was the first time the original negative was scanned since the mid-1980s," Trainor points out. "New scanning tech- nology allowed us to capture a lot more informa- tion, so we were able to make it look as good as the first day it screened." "We scanned Night of the Living Dead 4K full frame using a wet-gate scanner," says Adam Wangerin, qual- ity control supervisor at New York City's Cineric (www. cineric.com). "The wet-gate utilizes a liquid that has the same index of refraction as the base of the film thus filling in any scratch in the base. This reduces the amount of digital clean up immensely. "Wet-gate scanning is superior to other scratch-filling techniques because it doesn't leave any artifacts. The liquid reveals the part of the image that would otherwise be blocked by the scratch. Other scratch-filling techniques use infra-red to locate a scratch, followed by filling in the scratch through digital approximation. Infra-red techniques will not work at all on black-and-white films [such as Night of the Living Dead] because black-and- white film grains are opaque to infra-red light." Seth Berkowitz, digital restoration supervisor at Cineric, notes that, "the original negative was in quite good condition. But the first frames of shots were often obscured by splices to such an extent that they sometimes needed extensive digital reconstruction." Berkowitz has "a strong affinity" for Blackmagic Design DaVinci Revival (now a built-in feature within Resolve) as his "home base for restoration. It has a snappy interface that supports a somewhat painterly approach to repairing images as opposed to stacking processes and filters, even though we do our fair share of that as well." Other tools on hand included HS-Art's Diamant software package, Cinnafilm's Dark Energy and Pixel Farm's PFClean. Cineric senior colorist Dan DeVincent manned Autodesk Lustre for color grading, concentrating on contrast and balance, and using his own LUTs to help achieve a more cinematic tone and quality for black-and-white projects. "I did the first pass on my own; I usually spend 40 to 50 hours on this," he reports. "Then Gary [Streiner] came in for three days of supervised review. He was very helpful. He had a very clear idea of the look and lighting, or lack thereof, for the filming. He also had some great behind-the-scenes stories of the cast and crew." George Romero later joined DeVincent for a day. "He was very happy with the grade. But, as with all directors that look at their work, he was itching to fix problems that had always been in the film — like stray camera and set equipment that occasionally made it into the shot. But he also understood that these problems were now part of the historical essence of the work. Earlier video versions had been severely cropped to hide some of these issues to the detriment of the proper framing of the picture." "It's always fun to work on something so well regarded and culturally significant," says Berkowitz, "and I think, in this case, our focus on providing dig- ital clean up that's pristine yet preserves an organ- ic, filmic look which respects the source material, served the project well." The sound restoration of Night of the Living Dead was performed by Burbank-based Audio Mechanics (www.audiomechanics.com), which specializes in such work. To restore the horror classic, the facility A wet-gate scanner helped in the restoration of Night of Night of Night the of the of Living Dead. Audio Mechanics handled sound restoration.