How Criterion Collection Brings Movies Back From the Dead

I'm Lea Cline I'm a technical director at the criterion collection we're gonna talk about foreign correspondent the original negative that went through the camera that Hitchcock shot was at the Library of Congress which is great because most times a negative from that era doesn't exist so there's lots of issues about printing from generational use that causes problems things like we've where the film will move around Flickr there's light that gets in between the printing of the negative to the positive so you can get the original negative and it's in good condition you're in great shape we scanned it we were pretty surprised to see that the negative from 1940 was in such great shape in 2k the scanning takes about two days and 4k it takes four times as long so you would need at least a week to scan a 90-minute movie we had a little bit of a time crunch on there we decided to do this scanning in 2k and do the restoration in 2k as well we put up the film we scan it its frame by frame light goes into it shoots it makes a file the files are then collected and brought in as film reels so each film reel as a file for each frame in order to try to be accurate to what the film should have looked like there's combination of things we can do one is we look at the cinematographers work from the time period we look at the directors work from the time period we look at how it was shot with an on-location was it a studio you also know that you don't think that Hitchcock really ever wanted it to look like that you know so you kind of get to a place where you think it should be it's using a combination of scope waveforms and vector scopes for color if there's color and also just using your eyes with a picture with a properly calibrated monitor we have nice dark blacks we have whites that don't get blown out like in the sign here at the same time as we grade them and make them look like contrasting beautiful images that you would expect to see we put them through a restoration and the restoration happened simultaneously in this case with the color correction we have lots of different people working on the project at the same time in these rooms surrounding us are various restoration equipment my name is Russell I work in the QC restoration Department at criterion collection and this is a completely on restored scan of a foreign correspondent I just want to show you guys what it looks like before any sort of processing happens you can see the light you know scratches and dirt and there's some large film damage coming up the idea is to make it look clean but not create artifacts or put anything that wasn't there right now I'm displaying all the fixes that I've made the blue outlines are where the fixers are made so I mean this is very useful if we want to go back and delete anything that we've done just in case we've introduced anything that we don't want all that damage is there I'm Ryan hawlings on the head of the audio department here and I'd do a lot of the restoration of the sound for films right now I'm working on a foreign correspondent and things like dirt on the optical track well you know sound like clicks and pops and hisses and noise and all that kind of stuff so we go through and using a combination of automated processes and hand fixes remove all those things it's a pretty meticulous something like in here right as the car goes to that puddle the top end gets real crackly and nasty it's just distortion in the analog it's analog Distortion it's probably been there forever first I would try to do crackler that can kind of automatically get rid of distortion it doesn't always do a great job it's really hit or miss the coolest thing to happen to audio restoration in a long time is spectral repair tools what it does is give you a spectrogram of the sound where you've got time on the x-axis frequency on the y-axis and the intensity of the audio single signal is represented by the colors with old technology I would have to just remove everything there and use an algorithm that would guess what is supposed to be there based on what precedes and follows it with this I'm able to just remove what's on top it allows us to make really seamless fixes without affecting the audio above and below it render it and preview it and all that crackles totally gone Coleman I'm one of the art directors criteria I work on all the covers and packaging and many designs and we're always working on you know seven eight things at a time at various different stages of production I think one of the best things about the way we do design here at criterion versus you know other places is that you know we're really all about trying to stay true to the director's vision and to what the film is which is you know I think leads us to a lot more interesting sort of design places than just putting a famous actor on the cover cut there a famous actor or the Hitchcock film foreign correspondent we called up Patrick Leger who's an illustrator we worked with a couple times he was you know fantastic and great and had him do a few sketches so this right here is his first take on what was my initial idea of there's a famous and not to give too much away but assassination scene and felt he did a couple variations on that theme you know but then he also sent this other thing of kind of the moment right after where our lead character sort of chasing the assassin through the umbrellas polished that up a little bit signed off on that and then we brought in a designer work on some type hog Rafi and after on Miller is sort of our guru of period type he made you know a lot of different variations treatment and then we actually stumbled onto this type that was used in the original film trailer and sort of sent that to Ron and said you know do something maybe inspired by that which he turned into this ultimately wound up there that's the final painting which i think is pretty snazzy

Channel: Gizmodo

Views: 235,240

Rating: 4.9716344 out of 5

Keywords: Film Editing (Field Of Study), Alfred Hitchcock (Film Director), The Criterion Collection (Business Operation), gizmodo, Gawker Media, Design (Industry), Dvd, Editing (Industry), Filmmaking (Industry), film restoration, documentary, film remaster

Id: OdjqXOCeEtg

Length: 6min 33sec (393 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 26 2015

Reddit Comments

[u/KCBassCadet]

These guys are doing God's work.

[u/cocacola1]

Barnes and Noble sale is in a couple of weeks, I think. Half off for an entire month.

[u/ChopsNewBag]

These guys have one of the coolest jobs I the world

[u/chefdangerdagger]

It's pretty interesting that all these old films can be restored to modern resolutions yet there's going to be a 'black hole' time period of movies from the late 90s to mid 00s that are stuck at low-resolutions.

[u/Erfolgg]

One of the companies for whose existence I feel grateful and that gets my money regularly. Criterion is a marvelous marvelous company.

[u/NewClayburn]

Someone should come out with The Michael Crichterion Collection.

[u/Fredasa]

It's funny that weave is specifically mentioned, as that is the one thing that is almost never fixed, including on Criterion releases. In fact, ten years ago when the Disney True-Life Adventures got released and their restorations were absolute works of art including weave correction, the brutal truth is that they'd done a better job than Criterion had ever managed, and I wondered at the time if this was the beginning of a paradigm shift. It wasn't.

[u/[deleted]]

There is another group called Vinegar Syndrome that is doing the same thing, only for exploitation/horror flicks. A video on them and their process

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GEjWSJcrolU

[u/Zex77]

Awesome :)