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This occurs when a scene is shot in daylight, but the color is adjusted later on to make the scene look as if it is taking place at night. Another example several people interviewed for this article referenced were colorists being unaware of “day for night” scenes. Of course, those editions can already be plagued by inaccurate color timing, giving colorists inaccurate information as a reference point. Additionally, colorists often reference previous home video editions of films while performing work. Restorationists are under commercial and financial pressure, no different than in any other industry, and the quality of the work can reflect that (less commercial films often garner less financial resources, and therefore, time). This can stem from the simple reality that film restoration is a task performed by humans that can produce human errors.
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The director’s input can not only reveal necessary elements of the original presentation, but act as a safeguard for those performing the work.Īside from the intentional changes directors can make to their films, other films may look different than their original theatrical presentation due to a lack of accurate information at the disposal of those performing the restoration. The last thing anyone doing film restoration wants to do is make a judgment call that turns out to be wrong. Roeg’s insistence, however, led the restoration team to source an original release print from Paramount, which confirmed Roeg’s observation.
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The restoration team’s research showed the effect missing on the previous home video editions. When viewing the new restoration in a theater, the filmmaker remarked that a critical audio effect was missing.
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With the negatives being accessed and films restored to the glory only seen in original release prints, living filmmakers and members of the original production staff are then brought in whenever possible to sign off on the work and ensure it is “director approved.” This can produce findings not known since the film’s original release, as it did in the most recent 4k restoration of Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now. And Rec2020, which is used to grade films in HDR, has an even wider color range. The P3 color space, which is now industry standard, has a 25% larger gamut than the previous generation: REC709. And beyond the image quality itself, color settings are also superior in the current age. Collectively, this process gives people that restore films significantly more control than ever before over each individual frame of a film. However, now that hard disk drives are big enough to store each frame as a digital file for later retrieval, there is no longer any need to design a process around live output, and each frame is scanned with higher image quality. Without proper maintenance as they aged, the noise introduced could appear artificial and interfere with the image quality. While telecines often produced an acceptable image quality, they introduced video noise which would interfere with the inherent film grain. A film would be scanned in real time and recorded to video tape. In the mid-1990s, to scan a film in HD, CRT Telecines were used. The visual tools used to scan and restore the elements of a film have improved dramatically in recent years, producing a higher quality image than the early days of home video. Without being sourced from negatives and other early-generation film elements, the restoration of Ray’s films would not look as good as they do. Though charred, the negatives were preserved and by 2017, the technology finally existed where the films could be safely scanned. Many of the films of Satyajit Ray were damaged in a fire in 1993. The Apu Trilogy provides a great example of why this is so important. The negative is incredibly valuable from both an artistic and intellectual property perspective, and studios and libraries that hold copies of film negatives have an incentive to ensure they are touched as rarely as possible. David Mackenzie, owner and CEO of Fidelity in Motion, explained that when preparing a film for broadcast or early days of home video, there would have been no reason to utilize the OCN because consumer products like televisions wouldn’t have had the ability to broadcast the level of detail present. This is far different than the sources used to create television broadcasts, VHS copies, or early DVDs. Ideally, digital restorations will be sourced from the original camera negative, the film element which will have the greatest possible amount of detail.