Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/221535
that's where the gold is. People don't realize how much information is lost when film is photochemically duplicated and printed. And how much can be gained from a digital intermediate restoration process." The company is currently working on an initial batch of 65 shows, all color episodes from the series' later years. Cinelicious sought the 16mm A-B ECO original camera positives and found them in the archived shows. "We'd like to have first-generation elements for every episode, but some shows are incomplete and we have to use secondgeneration elements," says Korver. The Digital Film Technology Scanity 4K film scanner is tailor-made for the project, offering a broad depth of field and a wide dynamic range. "With archival films, you're often dealing with spliced film; other scanners don't hold focus over splice bumps, but due to its deeper depth of field, the Scanity's frames are always in focus," Korver explains. Scanity's IR channel helps with Death Valley Days' color episodes, addressing dirt and defects on top of the film as well as scratches in the film in a "precise way that's faster and more efficient" than other platforms. Cracking effects that Korver refers to as "spider webbing" are a particular problem for the series. "I haven't seen this much spider webbing before," Korver admits. "In certain episodes, it's been a big challenge." Cinelicious uses the Scanity's IR channel, in conjunction with Pixel Farm's PFClean and Digital Vision's Phoenix Refine, to define the cracks and repair them. Every episode requires a lot of human intervention, according to Korver. "I haven't seen an automated approach that achieves a beautiful, remastered look. You always need a person — an artist with a discerning eye. We do all the work in-house; nothing is offshored." Cinelicious has "great colorists" working on the show as well. "Some episodes have a broad variance of color," he notes. "Some from the original camera positive have no timing baked in at all. It takes an experienced colorist to produce an image that's period accurate." The company is also performing the series' audio restoration; it's capable of scanning any film-audio format, including magnetic and optical S8mm, 16mm and 35mm, and full-coat multitrack, including Dolby. For Death Valley Days, though, "some 16mm has been ¼-inch magnetic with the unique Ryder sync, which Audio Mechanics handled for us," Korver says. "The 35mm episodes mostly have no mag elements, so we're scanning the 35mm track negative elements here, doing a noise reduction pass, addressing clicks and pops as needed, and making sure the levels are legal." Cinelicious recently invested in a Lasergraphics ScanStation 2K film scanner for 8mm, S8mm and 9.5mm formats. Korver hopes that platform will extend restoration work to include historical documentaries and films by important experimental artists. "The industry is at the cusp of doing restoration more cost-effectively," he says, "although MTI Film now has the ability to play back up to eight 4K streams in realtime through 48TBs of CacheIO SSD storage. "It allows artists to play back clips in realtime and offers a tremendous amount of bandwidth for background operations, because every time you touch the SAN to copy something or perform tasks that aren't even germane to the restoration, you're consuming bandwidth. It's expensive but worth it for improving the quality of the product," he explains. In addition to the SAN, MTI Film uses its own Correct DRS software, which caches :30s of 4K frames into memory, enabling "a workstation to become a caching mecha- some rights holders still don't recognize that. It would be tragic if they don't preserve what they have." nism," Chernoff says. Together, the SAN and software give "a real boon" to the company's 4K efficiency. When Chernoff looked at the negative of North to Alaska he found its physical condition to be quite good. "Fox did a great job of storing it under the right conditions," he says. The negative had the typical scratches and dirt to be expected on film of that vintage, with several tears to be repaired. At the same time, the film was scanned on a non-realtime Image Trends ScanMaster 4000 system. Image Trends' Digital ICE software was used to detect surface dirt and scratches, and fix them without requiring a liquid gate process. "It's a very green solution," says Chernoff of the fully-automated Digital ICE. "We were able to use it to great advantage on the original color negative, which is 90 percent of the film." MTI Film did encounter film warp, however, "particularly due to generational loss in areas where opticals were done. Warps were all fixed using our dewarp module in Correct DRS," he points out. The biggest challenge to the restoration was the color fading "that manifests itself in a NORTH TO ALASKA The 1960 20th Century Fox Gold Rush comedy North to Alaska, starring John Wayne, Stewart Granger, Ernie Kovacs, Fabian and Capucine, is a favorite of fans of The Duke, so when the color negative began to fade, the studio went to Hollywood's MTI Film (www.mtifilm.com) for a complete digital restoration. "The scanning, restoration, color correction and film out were all done at 4K," says MTI Film CEO, Larry Chernoff. "4K is quickly becoming the standard in the US; certainly, at the Hollywood studio level, it's de rigueur. Working at anything less would be considered a technological mistake, especially in light of UHD." Restoration at 4K has two principle effects, however. "It requires four times the amount of storage than 2K, and processing and rendering take four times longer," Chernoff notes. "How to gain efficiency in 4K is something every restoration company has to learn." www.postmagazine.com MTI Film performed a 4K restoration of North to Alaska, with Jeremy Sawyer serving as colorist. Post • November 2013 33