Nestled away in an unassuming alley near London's bustling Hammersmith neighborhood, Silver Salt Restoration is building one of the most formidable reputations in an important but often unrecognized or misunderstood nook and/or cranny of preserving films and restoring films, both of which allow them to be released in high definition for home theater enthusiasts. Blu-ray.com staff reviewer Jeffrey Kauffman had the great pleasure of touring Silver Salt on a recent trip to London, and when Studio Canal's
Hitchcock: The Beginning set arrived in his review queue, a set which Silver Salt had a major hand in, he thought members of this site might be interested in some of the behind the scenes activity that help to bring restorations like those offered in this set to eager viewers.
Taking part in the interview were Silver Salt's Mark Bonnici, Managing Director; Anthony Badger, Head of Restoration; Ray King, Head of Film; Steve Bearman, Senior Grader; and Marie Fieldman, Film Technician.
JMK: Give our readers a little background "biographical" information on Silver Salt.
SS: We were founded in 2017, spurred on by the closure of Deluxe's restoration department, where some of us had worked. We wanted to create an artisan niche restoration company with the aim of putting restoration in the mainstream core of content distribution.
JMK: It's my understanding that at least a couple of people on your team had some participation in the massive BFI restoration of Hitch's silents called
The Hitchcock 9, some of which have been included in this Studio Canal set?
SS: Yes, both Mark and Steve had a hand in the BFI restorations when they worked at Deluxe before coming to Silver Salt. Steve graded most of the
Hitchcock 9 project and worked with the BFI to create a workflow that digitally mimicked the process at the time to create as accurate as possible tints and tones. For the tint Steve graded through a saturation curve, where black was 0% white was 100% and did the opposite for the tone and then the colour for tint and tone was pushed through the sat curve to try to best mimic the chemical process. Therefore, the tint was saturated in the highlights tailing off as it got into the lowlights and for the tone the colour was saturated in the lowlights and tailed off the closer to the highlights it got. This allowed Steve to manipulate the tint and tone separately in an organic way. The BFI has examples that they would put on the lightbox, and we'd try to translate that onto the screen as best we could. The BFI went all out with these restorations even commissioning new scores.
JMK: I'm assuming that experience gave you some foreknowledge about how to handle the Studio Canal project?
SS: Yes, thankfully clients like Studiocanal and BFI have an excellent understanding of how much work is required for these types of remastering/restoration projects, so more time and budget is allocated for movies of this age.
Rich and Strange and
Number Seventeen were both completed during the pandemic. Ray King, our head of scanning, found that a wetgate scan would be beneficial for both features. Wetgate scanning is a very slow technically heavy process, so it takes a very experienced scanning technician to run the wetgate.
We had a few weeks between features, so essentially there was a point where we were restoring them at the same time. Projects like these can come with many issues and are intense by the sheer number of interventions/repairs made therefore you need experienced digital restoration artists working on them. Anthony Badger did the front-end restoration work for each feature. This means applying a de-flicker pass and a stabilisation pass and also repairing major faults.
Juno and the Paycock and the
Blackmail talkie were completed in August 2024. Ray King graded
Rich and Strange, Number Seventeen, Juno and the Paycock and the
Blackmail talkie.
JMK: I was excited to get an up close and personal view of your ArriXT, which has the wetgate option among other bells and whistles. What are some of the key technological pluses this scanner offers Silver Salt?
SS: Superior signal-to-noise ratio, sharpness, dynamic range, colour reproduction and HDR scanning for colour and black and white material (with an ARRI ALEXA CMOS dual-gain sensor technology and high-precision Zeiss optics custom designed for the ARRISCAN XT). The XT also offers native 6K scanning, superior image stability (both mechanical and optical pin registration available), gentle film transport (adjustable parameters for speed, ramping, film tension and pinless scanning) and distortion-free geometry (static image capture).
The wetgate option is a unique selling point for us as we are the only commercial facility in the UK to operate it successfully, it also handles mould pretty well, we and the BFI have had some great results.
JMK: What were some of the biggest problems you encountered in the restoration process?
SS: Flicker was an ever-present issue, which could be anything from pulsing from frame to frame, to a density change over a few seconds. Improving this issue greatly improves the watchability of the film. Equally there was much instability, thankfully in the over-scanned image we can see the perforations and could use these as the first pass of the stabilising. We can then further finesse this as quite often the film had shrunk.
JMK: The Silver Salt team really struck me as thinking that the preservation and restoration they accomplish is a real privilege.
SS: When working in such high resolution, you have a huge responsibility to the feature. Many of these releases are classics, loved by generations of film fans and now being restored for future audiences. We are fortunate that our clients know just how seriously we take our role both as film conservators as well as digital restoration and grading experts. We never forget from the very start of the process to the end, that it could be a very long time, if at all, before these film cans are opened again.