Hardrock69
12-21-2005, 09:31 AM
By Stephen Galloway
12-21-5
The first thing that strikes you is the cold: The moment you enter the deep, neon-lit vault, it snaps you in its grasp, locking you in a giant cooler thousands of square feet large.
The second thing that strikes you is the films, maybe 100,000 or more, all stored in metal and plastic cans -- from rolls of tiny Super 8 stock to 70mm megaworks -- with titles ranging from "John Huston and Friend" and "William Wyler Home Movies" to "Vertigo" (1958) and "Stagecoach" (1939).
This is the Hollywood headquarters of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' Pickford Center for Motion Picture Study, a 118,000-square-foot former television studio that has become a state-of-the-art hub for film preservation and restoration. The facility is a pillar of a vast international enterprise that has exploded during the past few years because of government and private funding that, at last, has provided the means to keep film from becoming extinct.
"There is more money and more public awareness about preservation in general," says Tim Kittleson, director of the UCLA Film and Television Archive. "It's a very different situation than even just a few years ago."
Decades after masterpieces like Erich von Stroheim's 1924 drama "Greed" were destroyed by indifferent studio chiefs or lost in fires and other disasters, the preservation business is flourishing. "Business" is not quite the right word, though, because preservationists can be found in two camps: at leading nonprofit archives including those operated by AMPAS, UCLA, the Library of Congress, New York's Museum of Modern Art and the George Eastman House in Rochester, N.Y., as well as smaller nonprofit organizations such as the government-funded National Film Preservation Foundation and the Martin Scorsese-backed Film Foundation; and also, of course, at the major studios.
On the nonprofit side, the U.S. government has played a key role, increasing the amount of money available for preservation.
"This last year, Congress more than doubled our funding," says Annette Melville, director of the NFPF, which distributes cash to archives. "It used to be $250,000 a year that we had to give out, and that has been increased to $530,000 a year. That's not very much by Hollywood standards, but it is by nonprofit standards."
After years of neglect, studios also are investing millions in programs to preserve and restore their libraries.
"We've put together this process where we look at all of our titles," says Grover Crisp, vp asset management and film restoration at Sony Pictures Entertainment and an expert in the field. "We work on about 200-300 films per year. Out of a library of 4,000, since we began doing this in the early 1990s, we have improved or remastered 2,000 titles -- and 1,000 of them have had full restorations."
Sony's major recent restorations have included Sam Peckinpah's 1965 war drama "Major Dundee" and Michelangelo Antonioni's 1975 drama "The Passenger." The studio has even rerestored films like Elia Kazan's 1954 classic "On the Waterfront," which was restored during the early 1990s and again in 2003.
"That film was torn -- the frames were torn in eight or nine sections -- and we were unable to do anything in the '90s," Crisp says. "But now, we can digitally paint out the scratches."
Sony is not alone in its commitment. Chris Cookson, president of Warner Bros. Technical Operations and chief technology officer at Warner Bros. Entertainment, notes that his studio consecrated more than $100 million for preservation during the late 1990s -- in addition to money spent for high-profile restorations including 1933's "King Kong" and 1939's "Gone With the Wind" and "The Wizard of Oz," the likes of which can cost more than $1 million apiece.
"In the past, with few exceptions, film studios were spending very little of their own money, and most of the money for preservation and restoration came from places like the National Endowment for the Arts," says David Shepard, a silent-film historian and restorer. "But DVD has made it clear that there is a commercial value in maintaining these films, and a number of the studios are starting to invest in serious, high-quality preservation instead of turning the material over to archives or the public sector."
DVD also has created opportunities for persons like Shepard, who recently released the seven-DVD boxed set "Unseen Cinema," a collection of personal and avant-garde films from the silent era.
In addition to increased funding, preservationists' efforts have been helped immeasurably by recent improvements in technology and digital equipment.
"Problems that were unsolvable just a few years ago, people are now technically able to tackle and are achieving amazing results," Melville says. "For instance, people have been tackling color-fading for years, and now, labs have developed processes to return colors back to their original (hues)."
Digital technology was so effective in the restoration of "Wizard" that even Cookson was amazed by the results.
"We scanned it at 4,000 pixels-by-3,000, which they call 4K," he says. "The things that you see in it, you've never seen before: You see the texture on the Scarecrow's face, and you see that there is actually a rivet between the eyes of the Tin Man."
But even with cutting-edge technology at their disposal, restorationists can find large projects labor-intensive -- not to mention time-consuming. Dave Bossert, artistic director at Walt Disney Animation's special projects unit, estimates that his studio's recent restoration of the 1942 classic "Bambi" required 14 months and about 10,000 man-hours.
Such restorations usually begin with detectivelike investigations into available prints and negatives. Bossert notes that after the "Bambi" negative arrived in Southern California in early 2004 -- it was transported from the Library of Congress' Ohio storage facility in a refrigerated truck -- it was cleaned and inspected, and every frame had to be scanned.
"Now the film was shot on what is known as successive-exposure film, or SE film stock, where you are essentially photographing each frame of film three times to create a YCM (yellow-cyan-magenta) record similar to the Technicolor three-strip process," he says. "But it is not three strips -- it is one negative."
Bossert and his team then used proprietary software to register the frames together and align the three-color records.
"That was all done digitally," he says. "Once we had them all combined, (we) ran a dust-busting process to remove the obvious dirt from each frame."
Disney had kept all of the original material connected with "Bambi," giving its restoration team the freedom to check documentation and prints for things like color-correction. According to Bossert, the biggest challenge was resisting the urge to do too much.
"You didn't want to change the film," he says. "Imagine removing dirt off a fresco in the Sistine Chapel: You want to go in with a Q-tip and not change the fresco itself in any way."
The "Bambi" restoration not only added a pristine title to the Disney library but also resulted in major sales of a newly issued DVD -- and Warners recently enjoyed the same bonus after restoring the original "Kong," the most-requested title in that studio's library.
"We were asked to start this project about five years ago," WBTO vp mastering Ned Price says. "It was in notoriously poor condition, so we started doing a cursory check -- a view of what elements we had and what elements were out there, in terms of archives and laboratories.
"The most difficult aspect of a restoration like this is doing the inventory, which means finding the materials around the world," he adds. "That was especially difficult on this title: It was an RKO feature, and it was owned by several companies worldwide."
Another key problem was restoring material that had been cut by American censors -- about 340 feet of film, or three minutes of running time -- and which eventually was reconstructed from prints held by the British Film Institute. Then began the task of improving the material.
Four Warners staffers spent 300 hours cleaning the original "Kong" print, with such terms as "lavender" and "M&E" peppering their discussion (a lavender is a positive print made from a film's camera negative; M&E is music and effects). Five years later, the restoration was complete, and "Kong" recently was issued on DVD.
"Complete" might be too strong a term for Price, though.
"I never consider a restoration permanently finished," he says, adding that there exists no proof that "Kong's" original negative and optical track were destroyed decades ago. "I have no documentation on this, and if there is no documentation, in my mind, I never give up."
What's more, restoring sound can prove even more challenging than restoring the picture on some movies.
"On a film like 'Bambi,' the sound elements that existed were the music, dialogue and effects tracks," Bossert says. "There weren't 24 tracks of sound; there were basically three sound elements, and they were recorded in mono. We had Terry Porter, an Academy Award-(nominated) sound designer, remix the elements, and he was able to electronically pull the sound apart and make it sound fuller."
That, Bossert admits, begs the question: Is it the right thing to do?
"What the studio decided was, on the DVD, you can listen to the original soundtrack -- clean, but still mono -- or you can choose to listen to an enhanced-sound version, which is fuller and more contemporary," he says.
Such issues abound during the restoration process, not only in terms of maintaining a film's integrity but also in weighing how its subject matter might affect modern audiences. While restoring Harry O. Hoyt's 1925 adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle's novel "The Lost World," Shepard encountered a vexing ethical challenge.
"There is a Negro character in the movie; he is supposed to be Brazilian, but in the movie version, they made him a shuffling Uncle Tom type -- right off the old plantation -- with dialogue titles to match," he says. "I didn't use those: I went back to the Arthur Conan Doyle book and used dialogue from the novel. I knowingly altered the film to make it presentable today."
One reason, Shepard adds, was simple economics. "I couldn't possibly have sold it to Turner Classic Movies and gotten any money back if I had used the original titles," he says.
Ethics and recent funding increases aside, money remains a key issue for nonstudio preservationists.
"We are one of the major funders of projects, but we only fund maybe one-third of the proposals that the archives submit to us," the Film Foundation executive director Margaret Bodde says. "We could be funding at a much higher level."
The Film Foundation, she adds, disburses $500,000-$1 million a year, depending on how much money it raises.
Economic and technical issues facing the film-restoration sector were discussed Nov. 30-Dec. 3 in Austin, Texas, during the annual meeting of the Association of Moving Image Archivists, which drew 600-plus attendees from as far afield as Australia and Ghana.
"We discussed issues of common concern, like questions of copyright and access," says AMIA president Janice Simpson, director of global preservation programs at Ascent Media Group. "The labs also showed off their state-of-the-art technology. The big issue right now is the use of digital intermediates in restoration -- when you record film into a computer and digitize it, then do the restoration work digitally and record it back out to film. It is an expensive project, so primarily it is being done by the studios, but it has a lot more capabilities (than standard photochemical work)."
An even larger issue is the hoped-for establishment of a standard that will allow film to be stored digitally, rather than on celluloid.
"The biggest challenge is finding an acceptable archival medium," says Colleen Simpson, managing director of film preservation at Technicolor Creative Services, which has restored films including 1925's King Vidor-helmed classic "The Big Parade." "Nobody has come up with a replacement for film; there is nothing that has been proven to last 100 years. You can't play beta tape now, VHS is going away, and if you don't have the machinery to play it or something happens to that tape, there is no way to retrieve it. There is often anecdotal evidence of something going wrong with tape or any of these digital hard drives."
AMPAS recently took a first step toward addressing such problems by forming a study group -- the Digital Motion Picture Archival Project, comprised of studio and archival experts -- that first met in June.
"Everyone came out of it saying, 'This is a huge, fascinating challenge,'" says DMPAP member Kittleson, whose UCLA archive includes more than 147,000 movie titles and 200,000 TV programs. "How are we going to archive the material? What will the formats be?"
Interest and money are making things possible for Kittleson and his preservationist colleagues that they could not have imagined only a handful of years ago -- but he notes that such possibilities could affect how and where restored films are seen down the road.
"The choice of which direction we head in is going to be crucial," Kittleson says.
http://www.rense.com/general69/age.htm
Haha fortunately rense.com once in a great while posts a story that has nothing to do with conspiracy stuff...
12-21-5
The first thing that strikes you is the cold: The moment you enter the deep, neon-lit vault, it snaps you in its grasp, locking you in a giant cooler thousands of square feet large.
The second thing that strikes you is the films, maybe 100,000 or more, all stored in metal and plastic cans -- from rolls of tiny Super 8 stock to 70mm megaworks -- with titles ranging from "John Huston and Friend" and "William Wyler Home Movies" to "Vertigo" (1958) and "Stagecoach" (1939).
This is the Hollywood headquarters of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' Pickford Center for Motion Picture Study, a 118,000-square-foot former television studio that has become a state-of-the-art hub for film preservation and restoration. The facility is a pillar of a vast international enterprise that has exploded during the past few years because of government and private funding that, at last, has provided the means to keep film from becoming extinct.
"There is more money and more public awareness about preservation in general," says Tim Kittleson, director of the UCLA Film and Television Archive. "It's a very different situation than even just a few years ago."
Decades after masterpieces like Erich von Stroheim's 1924 drama "Greed" were destroyed by indifferent studio chiefs or lost in fires and other disasters, the preservation business is flourishing. "Business" is not quite the right word, though, because preservationists can be found in two camps: at leading nonprofit archives including those operated by AMPAS, UCLA, the Library of Congress, New York's Museum of Modern Art and the George Eastman House in Rochester, N.Y., as well as smaller nonprofit organizations such as the government-funded National Film Preservation Foundation and the Martin Scorsese-backed Film Foundation; and also, of course, at the major studios.
On the nonprofit side, the U.S. government has played a key role, increasing the amount of money available for preservation.
"This last year, Congress more than doubled our funding," says Annette Melville, director of the NFPF, which distributes cash to archives. "It used to be $250,000 a year that we had to give out, and that has been increased to $530,000 a year. That's not very much by Hollywood standards, but it is by nonprofit standards."
After years of neglect, studios also are investing millions in programs to preserve and restore their libraries.
"We've put together this process where we look at all of our titles," says Grover Crisp, vp asset management and film restoration at Sony Pictures Entertainment and an expert in the field. "We work on about 200-300 films per year. Out of a library of 4,000, since we began doing this in the early 1990s, we have improved or remastered 2,000 titles -- and 1,000 of them have had full restorations."
Sony's major recent restorations have included Sam Peckinpah's 1965 war drama "Major Dundee" and Michelangelo Antonioni's 1975 drama "The Passenger." The studio has even rerestored films like Elia Kazan's 1954 classic "On the Waterfront," which was restored during the early 1990s and again in 2003.
"That film was torn -- the frames were torn in eight or nine sections -- and we were unable to do anything in the '90s," Crisp says. "But now, we can digitally paint out the scratches."
Sony is not alone in its commitment. Chris Cookson, president of Warner Bros. Technical Operations and chief technology officer at Warner Bros. Entertainment, notes that his studio consecrated more than $100 million for preservation during the late 1990s -- in addition to money spent for high-profile restorations including 1933's "King Kong" and 1939's "Gone With the Wind" and "The Wizard of Oz," the likes of which can cost more than $1 million apiece.
"In the past, with few exceptions, film studios were spending very little of their own money, and most of the money for preservation and restoration came from places like the National Endowment for the Arts," says David Shepard, a silent-film historian and restorer. "But DVD has made it clear that there is a commercial value in maintaining these films, and a number of the studios are starting to invest in serious, high-quality preservation instead of turning the material over to archives or the public sector."
DVD also has created opportunities for persons like Shepard, who recently released the seven-DVD boxed set "Unseen Cinema," a collection of personal and avant-garde films from the silent era.
In addition to increased funding, preservationists' efforts have been helped immeasurably by recent improvements in technology and digital equipment.
"Problems that were unsolvable just a few years ago, people are now technically able to tackle and are achieving amazing results," Melville says. "For instance, people have been tackling color-fading for years, and now, labs have developed processes to return colors back to their original (hues)."
Digital technology was so effective in the restoration of "Wizard" that even Cookson was amazed by the results.
"We scanned it at 4,000 pixels-by-3,000, which they call 4K," he says. "The things that you see in it, you've never seen before: You see the texture on the Scarecrow's face, and you see that there is actually a rivet between the eyes of the Tin Man."
But even with cutting-edge technology at their disposal, restorationists can find large projects labor-intensive -- not to mention time-consuming. Dave Bossert, artistic director at Walt Disney Animation's special projects unit, estimates that his studio's recent restoration of the 1942 classic "Bambi" required 14 months and about 10,000 man-hours.
Such restorations usually begin with detectivelike investigations into available prints and negatives. Bossert notes that after the "Bambi" negative arrived in Southern California in early 2004 -- it was transported from the Library of Congress' Ohio storage facility in a refrigerated truck -- it was cleaned and inspected, and every frame had to be scanned.
"Now the film was shot on what is known as successive-exposure film, or SE film stock, where you are essentially photographing each frame of film three times to create a YCM (yellow-cyan-magenta) record similar to the Technicolor three-strip process," he says. "But it is not three strips -- it is one negative."
Bossert and his team then used proprietary software to register the frames together and align the three-color records.
"That was all done digitally," he says. "Once we had them all combined, (we) ran a dust-busting process to remove the obvious dirt from each frame."
Disney had kept all of the original material connected with "Bambi," giving its restoration team the freedom to check documentation and prints for things like color-correction. According to Bossert, the biggest challenge was resisting the urge to do too much.
"You didn't want to change the film," he says. "Imagine removing dirt off a fresco in the Sistine Chapel: You want to go in with a Q-tip and not change the fresco itself in any way."
The "Bambi" restoration not only added a pristine title to the Disney library but also resulted in major sales of a newly issued DVD -- and Warners recently enjoyed the same bonus after restoring the original "Kong," the most-requested title in that studio's library.
"We were asked to start this project about five years ago," WBTO vp mastering Ned Price says. "It was in notoriously poor condition, so we started doing a cursory check -- a view of what elements we had and what elements were out there, in terms of archives and laboratories.
"The most difficult aspect of a restoration like this is doing the inventory, which means finding the materials around the world," he adds. "That was especially difficult on this title: It was an RKO feature, and it was owned by several companies worldwide."
Another key problem was restoring material that had been cut by American censors -- about 340 feet of film, or three minutes of running time -- and which eventually was reconstructed from prints held by the British Film Institute. Then began the task of improving the material.
Four Warners staffers spent 300 hours cleaning the original "Kong" print, with such terms as "lavender" and "M&E" peppering their discussion (a lavender is a positive print made from a film's camera negative; M&E is music and effects). Five years later, the restoration was complete, and "Kong" recently was issued on DVD.
"Complete" might be too strong a term for Price, though.
"I never consider a restoration permanently finished," he says, adding that there exists no proof that "Kong's" original negative and optical track were destroyed decades ago. "I have no documentation on this, and if there is no documentation, in my mind, I never give up."
What's more, restoring sound can prove even more challenging than restoring the picture on some movies.
"On a film like 'Bambi,' the sound elements that existed were the music, dialogue and effects tracks," Bossert says. "There weren't 24 tracks of sound; there were basically three sound elements, and they were recorded in mono. We had Terry Porter, an Academy Award-(nominated) sound designer, remix the elements, and he was able to electronically pull the sound apart and make it sound fuller."
That, Bossert admits, begs the question: Is it the right thing to do?
"What the studio decided was, on the DVD, you can listen to the original soundtrack -- clean, but still mono -- or you can choose to listen to an enhanced-sound version, which is fuller and more contemporary," he says.
Such issues abound during the restoration process, not only in terms of maintaining a film's integrity but also in weighing how its subject matter might affect modern audiences. While restoring Harry O. Hoyt's 1925 adaptation of Arthur Conan Doyle's novel "The Lost World," Shepard encountered a vexing ethical challenge.
"There is a Negro character in the movie; he is supposed to be Brazilian, but in the movie version, they made him a shuffling Uncle Tom type -- right off the old plantation -- with dialogue titles to match," he says. "I didn't use those: I went back to the Arthur Conan Doyle book and used dialogue from the novel. I knowingly altered the film to make it presentable today."
One reason, Shepard adds, was simple economics. "I couldn't possibly have sold it to Turner Classic Movies and gotten any money back if I had used the original titles," he says.
Ethics and recent funding increases aside, money remains a key issue for nonstudio preservationists.
"We are one of the major funders of projects, but we only fund maybe one-third of the proposals that the archives submit to us," the Film Foundation executive director Margaret Bodde says. "We could be funding at a much higher level."
The Film Foundation, she adds, disburses $500,000-$1 million a year, depending on how much money it raises.
Economic and technical issues facing the film-restoration sector were discussed Nov. 30-Dec. 3 in Austin, Texas, during the annual meeting of the Association of Moving Image Archivists, which drew 600-plus attendees from as far afield as Australia and Ghana.
"We discussed issues of common concern, like questions of copyright and access," says AMIA president Janice Simpson, director of global preservation programs at Ascent Media Group. "The labs also showed off their state-of-the-art technology. The big issue right now is the use of digital intermediates in restoration -- when you record film into a computer and digitize it, then do the restoration work digitally and record it back out to film. It is an expensive project, so primarily it is being done by the studios, but it has a lot more capabilities (than standard photochemical work)."
An even larger issue is the hoped-for establishment of a standard that will allow film to be stored digitally, rather than on celluloid.
"The biggest challenge is finding an acceptable archival medium," says Colleen Simpson, managing director of film preservation at Technicolor Creative Services, which has restored films including 1925's King Vidor-helmed classic "The Big Parade." "Nobody has come up with a replacement for film; there is nothing that has been proven to last 100 years. You can't play beta tape now, VHS is going away, and if you don't have the machinery to play it or something happens to that tape, there is no way to retrieve it. There is often anecdotal evidence of something going wrong with tape or any of these digital hard drives."
AMPAS recently took a first step toward addressing such problems by forming a study group -- the Digital Motion Picture Archival Project, comprised of studio and archival experts -- that first met in June.
"Everyone came out of it saying, 'This is a huge, fascinating challenge,'" says DMPAP member Kittleson, whose UCLA archive includes more than 147,000 movie titles and 200,000 TV programs. "How are we going to archive the material? What will the formats be?"
Interest and money are making things possible for Kittleson and his preservationist colleagues that they could not have imagined only a handful of years ago -- but he notes that such possibilities could affect how and where restored films are seen down the road.
"The choice of which direction we head in is going to be crucial," Kittleson says.
http://www.rense.com/general69/age.htm
Haha fortunately rense.com once in a great while posts a story that has nothing to do with conspiracy stuff...