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PICTURE & SOUND RESTORATION www.postmagazine.com 27 POST NOVEMBER 2016 C andidates for motion picture restoration aren't just iconic titles and blockbusters. Sure, it's time (almost 50 years after their release) to safeguard The Graduate and Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet, but it's also time to celebrate the cultural- ly-significant King of Jazz, once again in a full-length version, and the lost noir feature, Private Property, unseen for decades. KING OF JAZZ Jazz has been called the only true American art form. So early film doc- umentations of jazz are national trea- sures appreciated by music and movie fans alike. NBCUniversal recently re- stored the 1930 feature-length revue, King of Jazz, starring musical monarch Paul Whiteman and his Orchestra and featuring a concert rendition of Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue," whose composition Whiteman commis- sioned. The picture, which was filmed entirely in two-color Technicolor and boasts many innovative visual effects complementing the musical numbers, was selected for preservation in 2013 by the US National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant." The picture restoration required some detective work on Universal's part. The film was released with a 105-minute running time. It was later trimmed to 93 minutes, but Universal's intent was to recover as much of the original version as possible. Universal held a 105-minute soundtrack nega- tive, which served as the template for the complete motion picture. "The anchor of the project was what remained of the two-color Technicolor negative in the Universal vaults. That represented about 58 minutes," explains Peter Schade, vice president of content management at NBCUniversal. "Our 'puzzle key' was the soundtrack negative. As we consulted with organizations and col- lections all over the world and found film elements, we scanned them and digitized them and held them against the soundtrack: Was this material we had? Did it fill a gap? Was it in better condition than an existing element?" Most of the remaining 40 percent of the picture came from 35mm nitrate prints held by the Cohen Film Collection and the UCLA Film & Television Archive. A hard-to-find comedy sketch was discovered in a print from the Danish Film Institute. Any short sections of missing picture were filled in with production stills from Universal's archives. Two-color Technicolor processing meant each frame was exposed twice, in red and green, then combined to create the other colors — "you won't get a full color palette, but it's a dis- tinctive look," Schade says. Universal's negative was "in very good shape for its age," he notes. "The color reproduction was very good with really good grain structure and very little wear and tear." It was scanned by Cineric New York on a modified Oxberry. The nitrate prints were scanned by Prasad in Burbank with a DFT Scanity and by Universal with an ArriScan outfitted with a special transport and wet gate. The Cohen reels scanned by Prasad were in two-color Technicolor but had experienced "severe shrinking and some warping," Schade says. All scanning was to 4K. Post production in 4K was done by NBCUniversal StudioPost (www. universalstudioslot.com), consulting with experts James Layton and David Pierce, who recently authored the book, "King of Jazz: Paul Whiteman's Technicolor Revue." The Universal team performed extensive dirt removal, scratch repair and image stabilization with a host of tools, including HS Art's Diamant for stabilization and de-flicker, and Digital Vision's Phoenix for auto-filter. Manual clean up was performed with MTI Film's DRS Nova. The damage to the Cohen reels was remedied in Autodesk Flame. Universal colorist Mike Holgate tapped Blackmagic Design's DaVinci Resolve for color correction. His task was twofold: "trying to be true to the two-color Technicolor process," says Schade and "making sure the color was as consistent throughout as possible" — no mean feat given that various picture elements had been stitched together to recreate the full running time. "Sometimes, in the same se- quence, we cut from negative to print material and there was a difference in grain, density and color reproduction," he notes. "Mike had to smooth that out as much as he could, but you can never get every- thing to look identical." The 85-year-old soundtrack was also restored by Universal. "The per- formances were recorded as audio performances, so they had a lot more control" than if they had been record- ed live on the set, Schade explains. "The soundtrack was in surprising- ly-good shape with good fidelity. They reproduced the sound as well as could be done in that era." The audio team used Avid Pro Tools for the mono sound editorial, the clean up and the mix. Within Pro Tools, iZotope removed ticks, pops, drop outs, hum and hiss; EQ balanced out the frequency range. The restored King of Jazz pre- miered at MOMA last summer as part of a series on Carl Laemmle Jr. and has since screened at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and at other venues. "People who have only seen quick scans of the worn and damaged film over the years are now going to be able to see a film as close to the original as we can get," says Schade. "It will knock their socks off!" King of Jazz' of Jazz' of s Jazz's Jazz' sound restoration crew. King of Jazz of Jazz of was originally released in 1930. The picture restoration team.