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o ration Using post tools and techniques to preserve historic work. By Christine Bunish Cinelicious is currently providing both picture and sound restoration for more than 450 episodes of Death Valley Days, which aired from 1952-1970. were the completeness of the print and the new tools I have in digital audio restoration to fix the remaining problems," he says. "Since this print was made before the sound negative had suffered much of its damage, the audio sections that had to be repaired from alternate sources in the previous restorations were not a problem." But one issue that has plagued the soundtrack was a flutter artifact in several scenes most likely caused by printer slippage. To correct this problem, Jensen tapped a combination of tools. "The Audio Cube Spectropolator was effective at doing the spectral interpolations so I could get inside the audio envelope and fix just the offending areas without altering the rest of the track," he explains. "Then I applied Master Restoration Broadband DeNoise and Waves WNS to further reduce the problem. I probably spent about eight hours working on five minutes of audio. Though I didn't quite get every bit, the improvement is remarkable compared to the previous restorations." The more pristine source even revealed subtle sound effects that had been lost before, such as a match strike and the matchstick hitting the ground in the memorable haystack scene between Gable and runaway bride Colbert. "The third time's the charm!" Heiber declares, referring to Chace's third audio restoration of the classic film. Sony Pictures Colorworks handled the 4K picture restoration (See sidebar on page 32). Heiber notes that the latest audio restoration will support the new 4K image, but speculates that won't always be the case if audio tools lag behind their picture counterparts. "You'll have situations where the tools for picture work have improved immeasurably, but there have been no corresponding developments on the audio side," he says. "So you'll have a great-looking picture and a period-sounding audio track that may create a disconnect with the viewer. That's the challenge we face going forward." HER SISTER'S SECRET Not every film is It Happened One Night, but that doesn't mean that less celebrated motion pictures aren't worthy of restoration and preservation, too. Her Sister's Secret, a 1946 wartime romance directed by Edgar G. Ulmer, was one of the more ambitious titles from Producers Releasing Corporation (PRC), a studio on what was known as Hollywood's Poverty Row. "It was a B picture that Ulmer was able to invest with quality and sophistication," says Scott MacQueen, head of preservation at the UCLA Film & Television Archive, which restored the film with funding provided by The Film Foundation and the Franco-American Cultural Fund, a partnership between the Directors Guild of America (DGA); the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA); Société des Auteurs, Compositeurs et Editeurs de www.postmagazine.com Post • November 2013 31