posted 09-15-2005 11:34 PM                    

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What we retrospective houses have to do get stereo where the only exant prints are mono!

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posted 09-16-2005 01:06 AM                       

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Frank, they're mono because God made them that way. Nothing to be ashamed of!

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posted 09-16-2005 11:29 AM                       

quote: Gordon McLeod

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I don't know the model but it is Dennon player that is in the IMAX DDP systems and it uses speed control to maintain sync

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posted 09-26-2005 10:42 AM                       

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Carousel, the 1956, 20th Century Fox musical originally filmed in CinemaScope55, has been completely restored by the New York City post-production facility Cineric, Inc. Directed by Henry King, with music by Rodgers and Hammerstein, Carousel features Gordon MacRae as Billy Bigelow and Shirley Jones as Julie Jordan.

Cineric used a mélange of analog and digital techniques to carefully restore the film. The goal was to preserve the original theatrical experience in all its glory. The CinemaScope55 format combined four channels of stereo sound with widescreen images composed in 2.55:1 width to height aspect ratio and recorded on 55mm color negative film. Traditional motion pictures of this era were recorded on 35mm film in 1.33:1 aspect ratio.

"Our philosophy is that a restored film should faithfully match every nuance recorded on the original negative to ensure that the movie-going experience is identical," says Cineric President and Founder Balazs Nyari. "It was obvious that in order to achieve that goal the digital work from start to finish needed to be done at 4K resolution."

In the past, restoration work has often been done at resolutions smaller than 4K. Cineric's staff felt that using 4K resolution from scan to film-out was necessary to truly capture all the information in the film elements. An additional benefit is that the film is prepared for any future improvements in delivery and distribution systems.

"Carousel is a cultural treasure," says Schawn Belston, executive director of film preservation for 20th Century Fox. "We believe it should be experienced by contemporary and future audiences the way it was intended to be seen and heard by the artists who created this classic film."

On their own internally designed, engineered, and fabricated 55mm transport mechanisms and optical printer gates, Cineric first converted the original 55mm film elements into a 35mm interpositive (IP). The newly designed 55mm optical liquid-gate permitted them to retain the proper aspect ratio for the IP while hiding much of the physical damage on the negative. Once this new 35mm anamorphic IP was manufactured, it was converted to 4K digital picture files with an Oxberry scanner.

Cineric's experienced team of preservationists used two Da Vinci revival Restoration workstations to address image flicker, remove scratches and dirt, repair density fluctuations and solve other problems. Since there was dye fading in the original elements and inconsistencies in overall color, a Discreet lustre color corrector was used to make these other necessary adjustments. All of these digital operations were conducted at 4K.

The project required an efficient pipeline for transporting trillions of bytes of digital picture data from the scanner to memory files, workstations and ultimately to a Lasergraphics Producer Digital Cine Film Recorder.

"If you're going to truly preserve the intentions of the original filmmakers, you can't compromise by down-rezzing the picture files at any stage," Nyari says.

The digital files were used to create four products: a series of 4K files totaling more than ten terabytes of digital picture data; an HD master for DVD creation; a fully timed 35mm CinemaScope answer print; and a new 35mm color film element for archiving.

"We look forward to applying what we have learned on this amazing project to the restoration of other classic films," says Nyari.

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True 2.55:1 35mm prints with four-channel sound on an SRD track printed between the perforations were made, with the image extending into the area currently used for an optical soundtrack. These prints required a special aperture plate, recentering of the optical center of the projector and recentering of the projector relative to the screen, plus a different focal-length lens. Few screening facilities are equipped for this, so from the preservation IP a reduced “letterboxed” IN was created that fit the 2.55:1 image within the standard 2.35:1 aspect ratio, with small black panels at the top and bottom and four-track Dolby Digital and analog SR optical tracks.

The decision to preserve the films in 35mm was made for historic as well as practical reasons, according to Belston. “While there is a lot of image area in the 55mm negatives, the film stocks of that era were primitive by today’s standards. Both Carousel and The King and I were made just three years after Kodak released its first color negative film stock. One reason Fox originally opted to go with the 55mm format was that the negative stocks were low-resolution and very grainy, and the larger image area compensated for that. With today’s fine-grained film stocks, a contemporary 35mm negative can have the resolving power that the 55mm system had back then.”

For Cineric, restoring the CinemaScope 55 pictures was both challenging and enlightening. “We learned that ingenuity and commitment can overcome barriers, and that know-how and experience are vital,“ says Balazs Nayari, Cineric president. “Use every tool at your disposal, and don’t be afraid to experiment and fail. From an equipment-design perspective, field flatness in a new printer gate coupled with the need to do liquid gate without bubbles was a real challenge. We also learned that digitizing the film at full 4K resolution does, in fact, yield the best results.”

From the first test through the final prints, the restoration of both films took nine months. Although Belston and Nyari are mum about the cost, Belston offers that “the digital solution [for film restoration] has become much more attractive in terms of both vastly improved technical quality and price.”

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