Film Restoration Today: The Elusive Perfect Viewing Experience
mubi.com
mubi.com
"The loss of India’s film heritage has been colossal. Around 1,700 silent films were made in India of which the National Film Archive of India (NFAI) have only five to six complete films and 15 to 20 films in fragments. The film industry in Madras made 124 films and 38 documentaries in the silent era. Only one film survives, Marthanda Verma (1931). By 1950, India had lost 70 to 80 per cent of our films. And we don’t have to go so far back. Gulzar Saheb could not find the original negative of Maachis, a 1995 film. Mani Ratnam has lost many of his original negatives, which people do not realise, still need to be preserved even if you have a digital copy. The only world-class restoration of Indian films have been the restoration of Satyajit Ray’s Apu Trilogy that was done by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences and the Criterion Collection, Uday Shankar’s Kalpana and Ritwik Ghatak’s Titas by Martin Scorsese’s The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project."
In short, the only parallel cinema that has survived in high quality has been through the efforts of Western enthusiasts. It is consequently a struggle to find good or even passable copies of critically-acclaimed films by Shyam Benegal, Govind Nihalani, Buddhadeb Dasgupta, Adoor Gopalakrishnan, etc; though in the last couple of decades, NFDC's Cinemas of India [2] has attempted to rectify this somewhat.
[1] https://www.film-foundation.org/2018-kolkata-workshop-telegr...
I had to look it up, and it appears "color timing" was the analog practice of adjusting the time film took to develop, in order to over- or under-develop it, which seems to be primarily about exposure (brightness/darkness).
Whereas color grading is essentially about 1) ensuring an accurate white balance and then 2) adjusting further for whatever artistic warm, cool, undersaturated, etc. look is desired.
But this article seems to use the term "color timing" as a synonym for "color grading". Is this standard practice somewhere?
"The earlier photochemical film process, referred to as color timing, was performed at a film lab during printing by varying the intensity and color of light used to expose the rephotographed image. Since, with this process alone, the user was unable to immediately view the outcome of their changes, the use of a Hazeltine color analyzer was common for viewing these modifications in real time."
Color grading is more common now, but the terms are mostly used interchangeably.
Older producers and film workers will still say color timing because they grew up in the industry referring to the purely analog photochemical process (last used on a big film for There Will Be Blood). It's also said on more expensive jobs when they're billing a higher rate for your work.
When you talk about exposure remember it's timing per channel so that does allow you to adjust temperature.
'Grading' is a new term.
Color timing is what the colorist is adjusting in the color grading process.
I use a personal favorite movie The Boy in the Plastic Bubble as an example. I don't know why I like this movie as much, but I do. I just looked it up. It was filmed, or video taped, in 1976. It got four Emmy nominations.)
It was shot on video I believe? As a child, I recall it being a movie of a week film. It looked crystal clear to me, but then again my perception might have been different?
For years, I've seen the movie on PBS type channels. I think it's due to the dedgration of the original video, or film. It looked terrible. It was fuzzy, and barely watchable. I don't believe the remastered versions, if they exist, are good enough quality for the media companies?
Someone did a better job at restoration about two years ago, but it's not nearly as sharp, and vivid, as I recall, and it's only watchable in a small format.
Every time I watch it I get interested in video restoration.
My point is film/video restoration seems like it has so much room for research, and innovation?
From someone that has spent significant amounts of time in film/video restoration, innovation has been made. The ability to remove scratches/hair, color restoration, etc has come a long way (to almost be laughable at how easy it is with the right tools). That being said, the restoration can only do so much. Each recording medium/format has its own "quirks" or "characteristics". For example, 16mm has a very noticeable grain pattern compared to 35mm. Also, each type of film stock has its own color/exposure traits. Silver nitrate film has a different look than other film stocks, plus has the added bonus of being able to burn your facility down if handled improperly!
Then we get to video. Ugh! If this program that you are remembering was originated on video and is old enough, then it's only going to be a shiny turd after restoration. Watching old pre-90s SD content on a small screen hides a lot of the imperfections. Trying to uprez that content to HD or scaled to fill a larger modern screen will reveal all of those imperfections. The old SD video formats just did not have a lot of data to begin with, so making something out of nothing has only really been possible recently with some of the ML packages.
If you really want to go down the rabbit hole, look up the specs on the old video formats like 3/4" Umatic, 1" Type C, Betacam, Betacam SP, D1, D2, Digibeta, etc. That list is from older->newer, and by the time we got to Digibeta, SD was looking as good as it was going to get. That's still a far cry from the data we can now generate. Add to those limitations that every time you made a copy of it, you made that image slightly worse. BetacamSP and newer could handle dubs much better than the others, and Digibeta/D1/D2 could make actual lossless clones.
The producer(s) of ST TOS would have to know that the money earned from doing that work would be worth the effort. It could easily cost more than they'd make.
imdb claims it was shot on 35mm film. It also says "printed film format: 35mm" so there's probably a fairly high quality master out there assuming it still exists. Like you've noticed, the studio often gives whatever copy is handy instead of digging up the highest quality version closest to the source. Heck, in this article they were doing a 4k restore on a movie from the 70s but didn't get a release print until the director mentioned an audio effect was missing.
> it's only watchable in a small format.
By that do you mean 4:3, the almost squarish format? If so, that's how it was shot and how it will likely always be presented.
I'm glad I held on to the past releases, which I posit will remain the definitive versions in his canon.
Studio execs have no incentive to do anything with that pile of archives since the copyright effectively never expires.
If the copyright actually expired, the studio would have to release those to monetize them or risk getting scooped by someone else. As things stand, they just leave them in the vaults until they catch fire and burn.
I guess I'm not an expert, because I see a great advantage in being able to improve the movie to make it more enjoyable to watch.
For example, take Wings (1927). The version I saw recently was a very sharp HD version. They enhanced it a bit by drawing a bit of color on flames, and added a noise here and there.
I'd take that way further:
1. colorize it with ML learning techniques and techniques used by the /r/colorizedhistory subreddit
2. lip read the actors, get rid of the title cards, and dub in the voices
3. add foley sound effects
4. add appropriate music
People can still see the original if they want, and others can enjoy what the director would likely have done if sound and color were available.