American Cinematographer - March 2017 - 76

While directing
The Spirit of the
Mask, von
Puttkamer assists
Kwakiutl dancers
in supporting the
weight of the
giant cannibal
bird masks.

was our 1999 award-winning documentary
Sasquatch Odyssey: the Hunt for Bigfoot, a
fun and often mysterious look at the history
of the hunt for Bigfoot, featuring the original four eccentric researchers from the
1950s and '60s. Selected for the International Documentary Association's Doctober
Festival, the show has enjoyed a long life as
a DVD on Amazon, but its standard-def
format has hampered our ability to sell this
evergreen project to global streaming
services and broadcasters. For this endeavor,
we hope to take advantage of another Illuminate offering: Smartrez IT, which uses
sophisticated proprietary algorithms to
enable content owners to convert standardand high-definition material to HD, 2K, 4K,
UHD and HDR. This non-real-time process
utilizes numerous filters to sharpen the
images; reduce noise and composite artifacts; address aliasing problems; eliminate
3:2 pull-down; and fix broken cadences
through advanced, frame-by-frame motion
tracking. The technology operates much
more quickly than SD-HD up-converts of the
past. Illuminate conducts short, free-ofcharge sample tests, and at project completion provides clients with the final file. The
system has been used to convert such series
as Love & War, Married... With Children and
Who's the Boss?
With all the focus on images, sometimes we forget there's sound to be dealt
with as well. Although Vancouver is a major
film-production center, we discovered that
not a single sound facility still has audiotape
capabilities. And yet, like in some postapocalyptic era, there are people living on the
fringes who collect old pro-audio equip76

March 2017

ment and are doing restoration for filmmakers and older rock bands whose master
recordings live on tape. In our case, audio
tests were done under the supervision of
archivist Jamie Anstey, who successfully
baked and then transferred several voiceover tracks from the big reels running at 15
ips. Now I knew our sound could be
restored - on a tight budget.
As even the most well-planned film
and video conversion will run the average
filmmaker thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars, I'd be remiss if I didn't
point to such lower-cost options as eBay
and Blackmagic Design - which can be
particularly helpful for people with lots of
footage.
On eBay, I was able to pick up halfa-dozen old video-broadcast decks for only
a few hundred dollars apiece. In some cases
they needed cleaning and even replacement parts - and I had to search for the
last surviving technicians who can repair
Sony Betacam, HDCam and Panasonic
DVCPro HD decks - but with many of
these decks still selling for as much as
$32,000 in pro-video retail shops, even
with the repairs my online finds proved to
be a bargain. And with the decks at our
facility, we've been able to first transfer the
original documentaries to Apple ProRes
4:2:2 HQ, and then up-convert them to
1920x1080 HD with Adobe Premiere, or on
the excellent AJA Kona cards on traditional
Final Cut systems. Plus, we could now
access all the original camera tapes, some
of which are 20 years old or more, both to
assemble new productions and to preserve
them for the future.
American Cinematographer

In regard to film, Blackmagic Design's
Cintel scanner converts 16mm and 35mm
film to up to 4K Ultra-HD, and you can buy
one for around $30,000. The latest version
of the scanner uses Mac-based Thunderbolt
2, making for easy setups that run smoothly
in real time while handling film gently but
quickly. At a fast 20 Gb/s, you can transfer
all this data directly to your computer and
color correct with DaVinci Resolve, which is
included.
Lastly, as a filmmaker concerned
about legacy projects, I'm not sure the digital files we shoot with today are providing
the best archiving opportunities. These digital captures of our images over a wide array
of formats and codecs are often housed
temporarily on fickle hard drives, which are
subject to corruption and/or self-destruction
after only 5 years or so. At least with the film
and much of the tape in our library, we
know the images are there and accessible
for at least 20 years, and likely beyond. LTO
data-tape systems for backups are providing
some solutions, though the medium is also
vulnerable to corruption and drive issues, as
well as ever-changing software/drive
upgrades that potentially render older LTO
data tapes useless after just a few years of
preservation.
What is the answer, then? While vast
servers and specialized Web-based cloud
systems are becoming more common, just
how easy and expensive is it for the average
filmmaker to upload terabytes of information? And then there's security. Are hackers
going to be able to find their way into large
cloud-based storage systems, despite
encryptions, and destroy or remove
terabytes of original material? Amazon
Glacier currently seems to offer the best
solution for safely backing up terabytes of
data at a reasonable cost - but will studios,
networks and serious filmmakers entrust
their valuable original materials to a publicly
shared storage bank?
The future of film and video archiving is bright, though uncertain in many
ways. Yet even with an unsolved mystery or
two, don't throw away your original
footage and older SD projects. They may still
have life in them - and the potential to
●
provide revenue in the digital age.

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - March 2017