On August 21-22, the Association of Moving Image Archivists (
AMIA) is holding
its technical symposium "The Reel Thing XXII", announced by AMIA Managing
Director Laura Rooney and organised and coordinated by Grover Crisp and
Michael Friend. Topics presented will include the restoration of 'Rashomon', 'The
Red Shoes', 'How to Marry a Millionaire', and the NASA Apollo 11 EVA moon
tapes, and the challenges of restoring classic films in 4K. Several film
screenings are scheduled, including the sneak preview of a mystery "major
digital restoration" on Saturday evening.
The other films screened will be '
Snow White and the Seven
Dwarfs' (ahead of its October 6 Blu-ray release), 'How to Marry a
Millionaire' (which as of now doesn't have a Blu-ray release date), and Frank
Capra's silent film 'The Way of the Strong'.
Made during the early days of Technicolor, 'Snow White' employed the
successive exposure "SE" method for color photography as opposed to the 3-
strip Technicolor system, resulting in a negative of nearly 360,000 black and
white frames. This new digital restoration of began by scanning the complete
73-year-old camera original nitrate SE negative that is housed at the Library of
Congress. The audio reconstruction used the earliest generation 35mm
magnetic sound masters which were made directly from the original nitrate
RCA Photophone variable area optical tracks.
The original masters of 'How to Marry a Millionaire', the first film shot in
Cinemascope, suffered from shrinkage and vinegar syndrome which had
advanced beyond the capabilities of standard film transfer equipment, and it
was unclear if a transfer was even possible. Also, protection copies of the
sound master had built-in sound problems pointing to deterioration of the
masters when the copies were made. The presentation will identify the
problems that existed in the sound master and protection copies of the master,
and discuss how these problems were overcome.
Another presentation by Warner Bros and Motion Pictures Imaging (MPI) will
feature clips from '
The Wizard of Oz'
'The Wizard of Oz', '
Gone with the Wind'
and '
North by
Northwest', three 4K restoration projects, each with its own set of
problems (correcting inconsistencies on Technicolor 3-strip negatives on the
first two, reviving the color from a severely faded Vista Vision EK original
negative on the third).
The Reel Thing XXII brings together in one place a unique lineup of film and
audio technicians and specialists to talk about and show techniques and
advances in technology made in film preservation and restoration, which
eventually has an impact on the quality and fidelity of Blu-ray titles released to
the consumer.
The symposium program includes the following presentations:
- Adieu, Sweet Apparition. Hello Sweetheart – Get Me Rewrite!
- After the DI – How to Organize, Catalogue and Protect the Original
Negative
- Archiving, Preserving and Distributing Digital Cinema Collections: a report
on the results of the EDCINE project
- A Case Study in Sound Restoration: 'How to Marry a Millionaire'(1953)
- Challenges of Restoring Classic Films in 4K
- Electronic Archiving: Lessons from 8 years in the "DI Trenches"
- Managing Devices and Finding Data in Multi-Petabyte Media Archives
- Reclaiming the "Lost" Lunar Orbiter Survey Photos
- Re-outfitting the USS Arizona Memorial film
- Resolution Limitations of Film Scanners: More Pixels Do Not Mean More
Resolution
- The Restoration of 'Rashomon'
- Restoration of the Apollo 11 EVA Footage
- Restoring 'The Red Shoes'
- Restoring Silents: Early Capra
- Type-A Videotape and The Everly Brothers
- Vinegar Syndrome in the Workplace
For the symposium program and presentation abstracts,
see here.