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PICTURE & SOUND RESTORATION www.postmagazine.com 29 POST NOVEMBER 2016 against a misty, early morning shot of Verona, "which exacerbated any kind of flaw," he notes. "Everything stood out against that background." Paramount found the original live-action location footage without text and the original hi cons of the title elements. Roundabout cleaned both and recomposited the back- ground and text in 4K "for a nice clean opening — it's the difference between night and day," Smith declares. The same process was followed for the end credits. Once the restoration was done the entire film was color graded in 4K on Blackmagic DaVinci Resolve by senior colorist Michael Smollin in one of Roundabout's DI theaters. His reference was a previous restoration produced with video technology. But "since Michael was working in the film color space, which has a lot more resolution and color information than Rec. 709, he had a lot more room to manage the color and make it closer to Zeffirelli's original intent," says Smith. Particularly challenging were portions of the film set in the piazza. "There's a fight scene, killings, night scenes with torches and moonlight," says Smith. "Balancing the light and dark in them was hard — the bright sun and stark shadow, the right amount of light at night." Smollin and his team delivered a 4K DCP for theatrical release. The new- ly-restored Romeo and Juliet debuted last spring at London's BFI Southbank. PRIVATE PROPERTY Unseen for more than 50 years, Private Property is an LA-based noir thriller featuring young actors Warren Oates and Corey Allen (the bully from Rebel Without a Cause) menacing a beautiful, neglected housewife played by Kate Manx. The black-and-white film was directed by Manx's then husband, Leslie Stevens, who later created TV's The Outer Limits. "It was considered a lost film. Usually when you hear 'lost' it's about a silent or 1930's film. But Private Property was from 1960, and it was gone," says Craig Rogers, lead restoration artist at Cinelicious (www. cinelicious.tv). "UCLA discovered a duplicate negative and did a photo- chemical preservation. David Marriott, vice president of acquisitions and distribution at Cinelicious Pics, saw a screening of this new preservation print and thought it was fantastic and deserving of a full digital restoration." Cinelicious scanned the newly dis- covered duplicate negative on its DFT Scanity at 4K. "There was no major damage but a tremendous amount of nicks, scratches and dirt throughout," says Rogers. The scanned DPX files were shared by senior colorist Lynette Duensing and conform artist Zack Rogers (no relation to Craig). Zack repaired unsteadiness, splice bumps and jitter, while Duensing worked on the color grading. "The files came to me graded and stabilized," Craig Rogers explains. "Then I went through and started to clean up dirt, hair and scratches with Digital Vision's Phoenix Refine. The first pass was semi-automated, but after that it was all manual work since there was so much small damage." Rogers did at least six manual passes with the assistance of Michael Coronado, who lent a welcome pair of eyes to the painstaking process. Private Property "did not look like a low-budget film," Rogers notes. Veteran cinematographer Ted McCord, ASC, was its DP and a young Conrad Hall the camera operator. "It was beautifully lit and photo- graphed. There is even an underwater scene." Rogers's goal was for the picture "to look like it did on opening night — clean, but to not overdo it. It should still have grain, it should still look absolutely like film." Duensing agrees with Rogers's aes- thetic assessment. "The tools for color grading allow me to interpret what I thought was the artistic vision of the filmmaker. The elements were all there to begin with: interesting shot angles, interesting lighting decisions, Kate's skin glowed like an angel. From my standpoint, my work wasn't so much about enhancing images but about creating a gamma curve that brought the logarithmic scans into an opti- mized linear space, maintaining con- tinuity and correcting density shifts in optical transitions, still maintaining a filmic quality in the digital world. I wanted to keep the film as organic as possible. There wasn't a lot of grain to begin with, but I allowed what was there to come through." Using Blackmagic Design DaVinci Resolve, Duensing began with a Rec. 709 grade. Once that grade had client approval, she performed a P3 trim pass in the Cinelicious 4K theater for the cinema deliverable, which included a screening at a TCM film festival event in Hollywood. "One of the greatest satisfactions is to see your work on the big screen with an audience and hear their reac- tion to it," says Duensing. "At the TCM festival at the Chinese Theater you could see how organic the film looked: The images were sharp, yet soft and lovely at the same time. You could see the beautiful grain structure." Cinelicious Pics, the distribution arm of Cinelicious, just released the Blu-ray of Private Property. Its bonus content includes an interview with Alexander Singer, a still photographer who was on the set of the film. Singer later went on to direct many iconic TV series in the following decades. He contributed his thoughts on the film's production design and the importance of the feature in the context of the time. Romeo and Juliet and Juliet and was re-released in 4K. Paramount Pictures handled Romeo and Juliet and Juliet and 's restoration. Private Property was restored at Cinelicious.