Making a Good Thing Better

"Restoration is big business these days, and also very competitive. "But that’s great, because it really pushes the companies making the tools to try and outdo each other, and that’s how technology advances," he notes. "We don’t do restoration work like a typical post-production house would for outside clients. We do it for our films only, so we need tools that make the process quicker and more efficient."

The company owns its own facility, Criterion Post, as well as all its own equipment, including MTI and Digital Vision gear. Kline notes that all the restoration tools now available – "either manual processes, where you isolate a piece of dirt of debris and have the computer process it in with a fixed image, or real-time processes, where you actually do a real-time pass of dirt and scratch removal – have matured into very sophisticated systems."

Criterion combines both automated and frame-by -frame methods. Most of the work involves some clean-up done by hand, but a job usually starts with real-time automated tools. Kline notes that every job is different, but says it typically takes about one month to complete a project. "And over the years we’ve learned how to use both methods, knowing their faults and strengths, to get the best results we can," he adds.

To this end, the company uses a variety of tools — in particular MTI’s DRS system for manual frame-by-frame jobs and Digital Vision’s Noise Reduction System, which includes the Advanced Scratch Concealer, a real-time system that " basically removes dirt, not scratches," states Kline. "We’ve found that there’s no tool out there that truly removes scratches very well, especially continuous vertical scratches, which are hard for all tools at the present." MTI’s systems retain the grain structure of the film when a fix is made, which is very hard to do. They seem to have gotten it down to a science, which is why we’ve worked with them and used them for so many years."

This combination was used by Criterion on two recent high-profile jobs, Laurence Olivier’s Richard III, and Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard, "both of which have interesting pasts that we tried to work through and use current technology to help attain the best restoration we could," says Kline. "We used Digital Vision to remove some sparkle from little white and black dirt, but we find if it’s pushed too hard you get artifacts, so we don’t use it to that extreme. Then the rest is later removed by hand using the MTI system, and that’s basically the key to most of our jobs."

The first challenge for both jobs was to find good film sources. "If you use theatrical release prints, you end up doing a lot of work on inferior elements, and you end up with more grain, less detail and poorer blacks and whites," he explains. "Both films were filmed on VistaVision, essentially. The Leopard was shot in eight-perf Super Technirama, a very similar process, and a very large 35mm frame. And eight-perf meant that scanning it from the original material gave us a much better resolution, with greater detail and a better image to restore from."

By contrast, the original Richard III VistaVision footage was "in really poor condition and in dire need of a major restoration that the owners will ultimately have to do," says Kline. "In the meantime, we used a 35mm reduction that was very good, so we began with that."

Later on, the team added a lot of extra footage. "In fact, we used five different film elements to recreate the version we felt Olivier wanted, using his original final shooting script," he notes. "The film has had many incarnations over the years, including a different edit for TV and a black-and-white version also done for TV. So we tried to construct what we felt was closest to what he’d always envisioned, and because the 35mm film we used was not complete, we had to pull in other elements, including dupe negatives and some theatrical prints, in order to find the missing shots."

As Kline stresses, building up a "final" version from different sources is a big part of a restoration job. "And we were also pretty lucky, because even though some of the material was release print quality full of dirt and scratches, we were able to use Cintel’s C-Reality telecine technology at St. Anne’s Post, London, which is sometimes equipped with an Oliver," he reports. "This is basically an electronic wet gate."

Discussing the physical properties of film, Kline notes that all film images are sandwiched between two protective coatings. Light rays during the development process are reduced or reflected by surface damage to either or both of these layers, resulting in a printed image that can be marred by scratches and debris. A traditional chemical wet-gate process is an intermediate step used when creating new prints from original or duplication negatives, and in chemical wet-gate processing, the negative is bathed in a liquid chemical solution that masks surface damage, which allows light to travel unimpeded in the printing procedure, resulting in a cleaner picture.

For real-time use during the transfer process, Cintel has developed Oliver, a digital wet-gate system, based on the same principle but, as the name suggests, achieved entirely without the use of chemicals or the costly step of creating an additional print. Oliver collects the reduced light rays and recombines them to produce an original, near-perfect image.

"While most of the time we use a Spirit for our transfers, in this case using C-Reality gave us a huge advantage," reports Kline. "What it allowed us to do was, by reflecting the light onto the negative in a certain way in telecine, cut down a huge amount on the scratches and dirt and defects we’d normally find."

Kline notes that this technology only works when the problems occur on the surface of the film being used. "But when it’s printed in, that process is no help, so that’s why you’ll find people using C-Reality to transfer original negatives- you get all the detail of the original negative and also eliminate all the scratches and dirt."

When the entire film was finally put together, it was then put through the video restoration process. "That included some light Digital Vision and noise-reduction passes just to remove the sparkle," he says, "and then on to weeks and weeks of going through it all frame by frame to take out dirt and debris, reel change marks, tears, cuts and so on. And so the goal is to get the film looking as close to the original as humanly possible."

The company also does "a ton" of research on such jobs, Kline says. "I was also heavily in consultation with Robert Harris, who’s a well-known expert in this area," adds Kline. "He’s a great resource and he’s done a lot of work with large format, so he was a big help film-wise." Kline goes on to stress that all such jobs make assumptions about how the film originally looked, as usually most of the key creatives, such as the DP and director, are no longer with us."

"We used five different film elements to recreate the version we felt Olivier wanted, using his original final shooting script…. Because the 35mm film we used was not complete, we had to pull in other elements, including dupe negatives and some theatrical prints, in order to find the missing shots."

Fortunately, this was not completely the case on The Leopard. "Although Visconti’s no longer with us, we were able to track down the original DP, Giuseppe Rotunno, who really helped us get the right colors and balance," reports Kline. "We also pieced together many film elements to get the final version that will be seen on the upcoming DVD."

According to Kline, the film had originally been restored some 15 years ago by the producers in Italy. "But when they did it, they did it from four-perf reductions, which wasn’t the best way of doing it," he says. "They should have gone to the original, but no one really wanted to touch it- I’m not sure why- and we weren’t going to settle for that reduction as it had very flat color and loss of detail, and it had also been cropped. And even though the DP had supervised it, he told us he wasn’t happy with that restoration."

But everyone involved was happy when, after some research and detective work, the original eight-perf negative was located at a vault at Technicolor in London. "We then scanned it in eight-perf on a Spirit, and the results were pretty spectacular," recalls Kline, who then brought in the original DP. "He supervised all the colors and was a vital part of getting the look right. So, when we went a little too red, he’d say,‘No, it has to be browner, as that’s how it looked in Sicily. It was hot and dry and everything was dying in the heat.’"

The team consulted Rotunno throughout the restoration process and also rebuilt the title sequences. They also restored the audio using Pro Tools and Cedar technology, including a Decrackler, a Dehisser and a De-Clicker. "We were able to create something that was really beautiful, but that still had some nicks and scars here and there," he says. "Later, we fine-tuned that using the MTI system, and with both jobs we then went to HD D5. Using the Panasonic Universal dowconverter, everything stayed digital from HD to SD up until the final DVD encoding for release."

In the details, Kline says, every job is different. "We like to give every movie the same amount of attention, but you never know how much work is involved," he says. "In these two cases, we had important films to restore, and we had the ability to take something that was good and make it even better, and that made it personally very satisfying."