American Cinematographer - October 2011 - 72

These photos reveal the sorry state of the original print, which was shrunken, brittle and fused together when it was first turned over to Lobster Films.

and-white version transferred from a 1929 nitrate dupe negative, which also contained the final three seconds that were missing from the hand-tinted print, “we eyematched individual color frames and short frame sequences, which we’d reformatted as DPX files, to the dupe neg in a digital editing environment,” says Burton. “In this editorial conform we were able to see for the first time exactly what original color material existed, what condition it was in and which material was missing entirely. “The next step was a stabilization pass, adjusting the relative position relationships of all individual frames. Then de-flicker processing was used to balance frame-toframe and intra-frame density variations. Following these steps, we used Resolve’s color-correction platform to do a ‘pretiming’ to bring the widely diverse colors and densities of the various capture sources
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into reasonable proximity with one another.” The archival dupe neg provided the scaffolding on which the color elements were built, but to replace most of the material missing in the color footage, the team turned to a black-and-white nitrate print owned by Madeleine Malthete-Méliès, granddaughter of the pioneering filmmaker. This print was scanned at the French Film Archives of the Centre National du Cinema on a Sasha scanner, which outputs frames as vertically oriented TIFF files. This scan was reformatted to match horizontally oriented DPX files, and then the scenes were digitally graded to approximate the tinted look of the color print. “Then the serious image reconstruction began,” says Burton. “We used a palette of restoration and visual-effectsspecific digital platforms, including Digital
American Cinematographer

Vision Phoenix/DVO, MTI and After Effects. Our restoration team rebuilt shattered frames into new, full-frame re-creations of their original state. The black-and-white material was then digitally painted to replicate the original color frames where the original colors had not survived.” Today such colorization can be done with such precision that it can look like the footage was originally shot in color, but this would not match the look of Méliès’ handpainted original. In an effort to replicate the workspace the hand-painters worked with more than a century ago, Technicolor’s digital painters experimented with small-screen images approximating the size of a 35mm frame as they applied their electronic brushes. This helped them establish, for the final painting process, the look of the handpainted colors sometimes overflowing and sometimes not quite filling the image. “The black-and-white replacement sequences did not match the color material in size, position, grain structure or density because of the differing conditions of the source elements,” says Burton. “Each individual frame was carefully resized and repositioned as necessary. The grain structure was also tweaked to match the original source in order for it to intercut more seamlessly with the original. Once the reconstruction was complete, another stabilization and de-flicker pass was applied to further integrate the disparate sources. A final color-timing pass balanced the overall color integrity of the various elements, and then separate color-space grades were completed for 35mm, DCP and HD release formats.” “When Technicolor showed me a side-by-side comparison of the black-andwhite material and the original surviving color frames in January of this year, only then were we certain the restoration would be possible,” says Bromberg. “But we had no idea how long it would take — three months, a year? As it turned out, the work was completed on May 2, and the film, in its original colors, opened the Cannes Film Festival.” ●

American Cinematographer - October 2011

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