American Cinematographer - September 2009 - 78

Post Focus that there were extreme vertical-registration problems in quite a number of shots. We discovered that the problem actually went way back; we found records from Technicolor in London that showed they’d had to make corrections in 1948 to compensate for verticalregistration problems.” Gitt soon realized that the only way to do a photochemical restoration would be to go back to the cumbersome method of optical printing, which would add film generations and build up contrast. A digital restoration seemed to be the way to go. He recalls, “Cinetech was interested in using a combination of photochemical and digital techniques, and they did some tests using wet-printed master positives that came out very well, but we know that theoretically, it’s best to use the original picture negative if you can, so we also did some tests at Warner Bros. Motion Picture Imaging using the original negatives. Both facilities did very good work, but when we blew up the image very large, it was evident that scanning the original negs produced a result that was less grainy and sharper. So the decision was made to work with the original YCM negatives at MPI and use digital techniques exclusively to fix all the film’s problems, including mold damage.” At MPI, the 48 reels of original negatives — yellow, cyan and magenta records for each of the 16 finished picture reels — were scanned at 4K on a Northlight, and the scans were cleaned up using both automated and manual techniques before being recombined. “Normally, we don’t tweak the color levels when we do the recombine because we don’t want to affect what the color timer will eventually work with,” notes Bill Baggelaar, MPI’s senior vice president of technology. “On occasion, we’ve had to do major preliminary Pictured here and on the next two pages are frame grabs from the recent digital restoration of The Red Shoes, directed by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger and photographed by Jack Cardiff, ASC, BSC. Brand-New Shoes by Robert S. Birchard Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Red Shoes, an “art film” about the world of ballet, was eagerly embraced by audiences upon its release in 1948 and has remained a cult favorite ever since. Noted for its vivid color cinematography by Jack Cardiff, ASC, BSC, and its somewhat over-the-top passion for dance, the film is a favorite of Martin Scorsese, whose Film Foundation recently helped the UCLA Film & Television Archive digitally restore the movie in concert with the British Film Institute. The restoration team’s original goal was to do a new photochemical restoration using wet-gate contact printing from the original three-strip Technicolor camera negatives, a procedure the UCLA Archive had used to restore The Barefoot Contessa (1954) and Becky Sharp (1935). “We gathered a lot of material from England, including 48 reels of cut picture negatives, an original 1948 Technicolor nitrate print, and a 1955 safety reissue print,” recalls Robert Gitt, preservation officer for the UCLA Archive. “We took everything to Dave Cetra at Cinetech, and he made a new print using the three Technicolor negatives, color-timing the entire thing. That’s when we discovered some pretty shocking problems. “The picture negative was covered with mold — there were chalky deposits all over it,” continues Gitt. “[Archivist] Barbara Whitehead cleaned all 48 reels by hand and then ultrasonically; that took the worst mold off but left behind stains and little cracks and crevices in the emulsion. We were relieved when we saw Cinetech’s first test reel — all of the fungus damage had been eliminated simply with the use of diffused light and wet-gate printing. Then, when we saw the whole movie, we discovered that a lot of the material was badly out of register, much more so than in any other Technicolor film I’ve worked on. There had been differential shrinkage in the elements over the years, but what was even more worrisome was 78 September 2009 The Red Shoes images courtesy of UCLA Film & TV Archive.
American Cinematographer - September 2009

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - September 2009
