American Cinematographer - December 2008 - 76

The State of the Art: An Update the DI data is accurate and accessible. “Creating the separation masters is the first way we verify the integrity of the DI data, but not the only way, and that’s crucial,” notes ASC associate member Grover Crisp, senior vice president of asset management, film restoration and digital mastering for Sony Pictures Entertainment. “We discover problems in 50 to 70 percent of the data we get. It’s usually something fixable, like missing frames or corrupt files, but we’ve also seen problems that cropped up in the DI process and got backed into the final data — a grid pattern in the background of a shot, for example. If you get the data and just put it on the shelf, you’ve got a shelf full of problems.” A related concern, recently raised in these pages by John Bailey, ASC (Filmmakers’ Forum, AC June ’08), and echoed by some of the studio executives we interviewed, is that the DI process is resulting in scores of 35mm protection elements that do not match the picture quality of a 35mm original camera negative; like all the other materials recorded out from the DI, the archival negative and separation masters match the resolution of the process — typically 2K. Further, with 4K digital projection already possible, how long will those 2K-resolution assets be of acceptable quality? “There will probably come a day when people regret they didn’t do things in a higher resolution, but 2K is the methodology right now, and that’s a production decision,” notes Crisp. “Our job is to preserve the artifact, whatever that is. With digital, when you talk about the future, it usually takes a lot longer to get there than people think. After Spider-Man 2 was produced as a 4K DI [in 2004], the industry speculated that all DIs would be 4K in the near future, but now, four years later, 2K is still the industry standard.” (Ed. Note: As this issue was going to press, Sony Pictures announced it would use 4K technology on most of its 76 December 2008 filmed productions from now on.) Nine experts recently spoke to AC about the ways in which digital technology is impacting Hollywood’s preservation and restoration efforts. Here are excerpts from those conversations: Grover Crisp Sony Pictures Entertainment Sony Pictures carried out its first full-4K digital restoration in 2006, on Dr. Strangelove (AC Feb. ’07). The studio is likely to revisit many more titles in its library for such restorations in the next few “We discover problems in 50 to 70 percent of the [DI] data we get. If you get the data and just put it on the shelf, you’ve got a shelf full of problems.” — Grover Crisp Sony Pictures years, thanks to the advent of Blu-ray high-definition DVD technology and the proliferation of larger display devices in homes. “We’re now completing the HD masters coming directly from the 4K data on Dr. Strangelove, and when it finally comes out on Blu-ray, people will see quite a difference in image quality,” says Crisp. “Every studio is in the same situation; we can now do the work better, and we’re all taking a hard look at previous work and upgrading where we can. Everyone will eventually have to do 4K in order to create the best-quality material for the Blu-ray market and the bestquality material to lock away in the vault.” When he spoke to AC, Crisp was working on a 4K restoration of From Here to Eternity (1953) at Cineric, where Dr. Strangelove was also restored, and similar plans were in the works for All the King’s Men (1949) and Easy Rider (1969). The studio’s plan for migrating its digital assets is currently based on a title’s year of release. “Based on the life cycle of LTO tape, we migrate data every three to five years, working with the earliest titles first,” says Crisp. “That way, something is migrated every year, but it’s not the entire library. I think that’s a more efficient and economical approach than waiting 10 years and migrating a whole library. Of course, this might not be the way we do things five years from now or even next year — there are no standards for archiving digital media, so we’re all working with our best guesses. “We take a very conservative approach to preserving data,” he continues. “With DI data, we not only verify it through creating separation masters, we also load it in and do a visual check. Then we make two backup copies of it, QC both backup copies and store them in geographically separate locations.” The studio also takes an additional precaution with the original camera negative: “We isolate specific takes used in the final cut — flash to flash — and splice them together so that we have a shot-sequence-conformed original neg in a manageable format that we can vault. We do this in case we have to go back to square one in the DI process, scanning the negative. We haven’t yet had to do that.” Crisp believes the filmmakers who stand to lose the most in the digital era are the independents. “In the old days, a filmmaker who financed his own picture would leave the original negative at the lab, and a lot of that material has survived simply because it was still sitting at the lab. Data is different. A DI facility won’t leave your data on its hard drives or in its system if you don’t take it; they’ll get rid of it. For filmmakers who don’t have the financial

American Cinematographer - December 2008

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