The Big Restoration Question

The New York facility Cineric has long been a destination for restoration of Hollywood pictures, buffing up some 200 titles a year. Up until recently, those restorations have been photochemical, says business development exec Chip Wilkinson. That’s about to take a dramatic turn towards digital. 20th Century Fox’s Carousel is currently getting the digital treatment, from the first to last frame. Wilkinson says he thinks that analog still has strong legs, “but we’re recognizing, with the growth towards the capabilities of digital, including digital cinema and digital intermediates, we’ve got to move that direction.”

Restoration has been around for decades – since the studios first realized that their nitrate assets could literally go up in smoke. But maintaining film assets got a boost in the 1980s with the advent of home entertainment, when old titles brought in new money. But whereas low-res VHS obscured defects, DVD enhances them – and high-definition DVDs will make those artifacts pop even more. "What’s driving the restoration business is the DVDs," says Wilkinson.

It’s ironic that, in a year in which nearly everything – from color timing to motion picture exhibition – seems to be going 90 mph towards digital, restoration’s march towards 1s and 0s continues at a stately pace. But the miles of footage that represent Hollywood’s heritage are guarded by studio preservationists who believe in film. "Most of the archivists are film purists," notes Reid Burns, senior VP and GM of the laboratory division at FotoKem. "If they can, they’ll go to great lengths to find an alternate shot that exists on film before taking it into the digital world. And because they don’t have airdates, they can usually do it. They see digital restoration as a last resort."

Colleen Simpson, managing director of the film preservation department at Technicolor, agrees. "We basically deal with the photochemical world, the analog world," she says. "There are technological advances, but you’re still running film through a printer." Recent restorations at Technicolor include the MGM 1925 silent The Big Parade, 20th Century Fox’s The Agony and the Ecstasy and Paramount’s Chinatown. Although Simpson can readily outsource digital fixes to a Technicolor sister company, she emphasizes that the decision to go digital is purely the customer’s prerogative. "It’s a case by case basis, depending on what the film is and how much they want to put into it," she says. "But we don’t go to digital very often."

Digital has a bad rap in the restoration world because the early video tools – and, perhaps, early video sensibilities – didn’t take the concerns of film lovers into account. Early restoration systems that removed dirt also removed grain, and the end result looked more like video than the film it had originally been. "Our mantra is to take out damage and do no harm," says Cineric’s Wilkinson. "We do very little de-graining and re-graining. First and foremost, we’re film people."

Another major reason that the studio preservationists stick with photochemical fixes is cost. Experts put a photochemical restoration at between $60,000 and $80,000 – although it can reach $250,000 depending on the condition of the elements – whereas a digital restoration starts at $100,000 and can top $250,000. "In the past, digital was prohibitively expensive," notes Larry Birstock, executive vice president at Post Logic Studios. "I would always offer digital as an option, as part of a group of choices," agrees Technicolor’s Simpson. "But photochemical is less expensive."

Up until now, that’s meant that studios stick with the tried-and-true – venturing out to the less familiar and more expensive digital tools when the title is expected to reap big profits and the film damage is significant. "On a lower-end project, the [studio clients] tend to stay on film," says FotoKem Director of Film Restoration Peter Eaves. "When it comes down to a scene or two that’s damaged in a B movie, they might live with a patch job and finish it as best as they can. We’d love to show them more on the digital side, but they don’t always have the budget for it."

But the popularity of the DVD has upped the ante, since all titles released in that format go through a digital transfer in preparation for compression. "If we want to have incredibly high-quality images after finishing the compression, then we better have pristine pictures to present to the compressionist," notes Ron Burdett, founder and president of Sunset Digital. The booming DVD market has also brought new budgets for restoration, beefing up the previously meager amounts designated to maintain the condition of film masters. "It’s made it practical to spend more money to restore movies and raised the quality expectations," says Lowry Digital CEO John Lowry.

Sunset Digital’s Burdett notes that it’s difficult to distinguish between remastering, repurposing and restoring because the same tools are used. "The degree to which we use them is really dependent on the ultimate distribution of that particular element," he says. "As a practical matter in Hollywood today, distribution is king."

Facilities engaged in restoration today realize it’s not a question of if but when they adopt a serious digital pipeline. But how can they speed up the digital restoration process while bringing the price down and maintaining high enough quality level to please film purists?

One solution is to automate as much of the restoration process as possible – no small feat given that computers have been known to mistake sparkles, glints, stars and reflections in eyeballs for dirt. But that’s exactly the path trod by Lowry Digital, which restored Star Wars and is currently working on the James Bond films. "In the past, digital tools didn’t exist that could extract all the information from the film, so there was a concern about doing a restoration that didn’t do justice to the original," notes president Michael Inchalik. "Having said that, in many cases photochemical restoration didn’t do justice either, because it was making a copy of a copy."

An automated system makes digital tools more affordable than ever, argue Inchalik and Lowry. "The cost is essentially the cost of computing power, and computing power gets cheaper every year," says Lowry. "There were digital restorations in the early 1990s for millions of dollars that are being done today for $100,000 to $200,000. They promise to get even less expensive and yet deliver more potential in terms of the damage they can fix." Jitter and weave, printed-in scratches and dirt, imbalanced granularity, mold and dye fading are all restoration problems that can be dealt with more effectively in the digital realm, they argue.

With the ability to offer both kinds of fixes, FotoKem’s Burns and Eaves are evaluating 20th Century Fox’s 1960 Can-Can. "Some of the older material has some fairly severe dye fading," reports Eaves. "This film might be a candidate to go through our digital restoration program. Sometimes that’s correctable with normal photochemical processes and sometimes it’s not," Burns adds. "The fact is that we can deal better with significant dye fading with a digital repair."

Another facility that’s jumping into the "automated digital restoration" game is Post Logic, which has launched its system by working on a series of John Wayne movies and, most recently, Leaving Las Vegas. Director of Engineering Merle Sharp reports that the facility has been working on its automatic restoration system for almost two years. "One of the most important things is proper motion analysis," he reports. "The computer actually spends more time understanding which direction different elements are moving, frame by frame." Maintaining the original look by not de-graining the image is one of the proprietary system’s key elements, says Sharp, as is a render system that speeds up the process.

Sunset Digital got an early start in digital restoration when the facility helped manufacturer MTI develop its Digital Restoration System in the mid-1990s. After restoring Paramount Pictures’ The Ten Commandments for TV, says founder/president Ron Burdett, he realized that "restoration in Hollywood was becoming huge, beyond our imagination." Sunset Digital has now created a niche in the restoration of classic TV shows after restoring all 270 episodes of Cheers three years ago.

Restoration of television programs presents its own unique problems, since studios often don’t cut negative. Sunset Digital established a "forensic lab," composed of CTO Mark Smith, color scientist Eric Anderson, colorist Rich Garibaldi and senior editor Michael Kaidbey, to determine the provenance of the elements and develop a proprietary system for matching timecode and keycode. "Otherwise," says Burdett. "We’d have to transfer 30,000 feet of film and start all over again."

Facilities that have a long history of photochemical restoration, including Cineric, YCM Laboratories, Technicolor and Foto-Kem, have also been putting digital tools into place over the years. With its two Imagica "Big Foot" scanners, FotoKem also handles restoration of 70mm films, including recent work on Fox’s Dr. Dolittle. One of the Imagica scanners has been customized to provide 8K x 11K resolution for up to 65mm 15-perf film. FotoKem also relies on two Quantel iQs, MTI’s DRS, Shake, and Discreet Fire. Refined tools are helping all the facilities offering a mix of photochemical and digital processes. Sunset Digital lists the Snell & Wilcox Archangel and DaVinci color-correctors. Automated restoration systems, however, which promise to save time and money, are still homegrown.

What do facilities need to offer before the studio’s gatekeepers more readily accept digital restoration? "It’s creating a process that will make clients happy [and] make sure you have a digital process they won’t regret using," says Technicolor’s Simpson. "Ultimately, that means that you go through all the processes and when it comes out the other side, it still looks like film, like the original."

Though facilities disagree about where to draw the line between "restoration" and "enhancement," everyone agrees that an acceptable digital restoration begins with resolution and lots of it, many pointing to a 4K scan as the threshold of acceptability. Though facilities including FotoKem are already doing 4K and higher scans, it’s not yet a commodity. "4K is time consuming, it’s expensive and it takes a lot of storage," enumerates Burdett, who reports his facility is testing 4K now. "Is it practical? Not really yet. But it’s all changing, and at one point we’ll be able to do 4K images as easily as we’re now doing HD and 2K."

The impact of digital intermediates on the future restorations of today’s films is also worth considering. The DI has caught fire in Hollywood, and an increasing number of movies are getting their final grade in a digital suite rather than a photochemical bath. For the film that’s had a DI finish, what will this mean 10 or 20 or 50 years from now, when studios decide to restore it?

Cineric’s Wilkinson believes that, as facilities begin to standardize the DI process, it will positively impact restoration. "DIs are encouraging restorations," he says. "If Spider-Man 2 was done in 4K and we’re going to restore it, why not restore it in 4K? If you move toward 4K, you’ll be ready for the future."

The prevalence of the DI process may also have the impact of convincing filmmakers that the digital touch isn’t anathema. "If a DI is good enough for a new movie, what’s wrong with it for an old one?" asks Lowry Digital’s Lowry.