Il Dottor Stranamore
Note sul restauro
New York's Cineric recently created a new black-and- white film print of Stanley Kubrick's classic 1964 anti-war film, Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, using an all-4K pipeline under supervision from Grover Crisp, Sony Pictures VP of asset management and film restoration.
Working from a fine-grain master provided by Sony, Cineric scanned the movie on a specially configured Oxberry scanner to convert it to a 4K, 10-bit DPX file. Over the course of about six months, the company used a combination of Da Vinci's Revival and Autodesk's Lustre softwares to clean up dirt, scratches, density, and contrast. Cineric then filmed it out on a Lasergraphics Producer film recorder to a specially ordered Kodak black-and-white camera stock that left Sony with a sparkling new film negative for archival use.
“Original elements were no longer available, and the Dr. Strangelove fine grain had some damage and flaws to it, so it was not the best long-term archival medium,” explains Daniel DeVincent, director of digital imaging at Cineric and colorist on the project. “Therefore, it made sense to make a new film element, and we often do that photochemically here. But photochemically, there is only so much we can deal with in terms of dirt and scratches, and so we felt we had to do it digitally. That meant we had to do it 4K, because our president, [Balázs Nyari], feels strongly that important titles deserve a full 4K restoration process, now that we have that capability.”
DeVincent created a series of look-up tables (LUTs) to optimize the scanner for each specific element. Cineric also used a wet-gate scanning technique to further eliminate flaws during the scanning process. Revival's deFlicker and grain and noise reduction and stabilization features were used extensively on the job, DeVincent adds. Cineric built a 60TB Apple xRAID and xSAN network around the time it took on the project, with about 40TB of that used on the project.
Overall, the process involved a wide range of creative and technical challenges, according to DeVincent.
“The basic concern was the fact that we were dealing with a fine-grain master,” he says. “That's a very wide dynamic range element made from the original negative, but we had no original negative. To scan it, we had to figure out how to scan as much of the fine grain as possible, so we had to develop a special LUT to bring it all into 10-bit log space to give us more range to work with. Once we dealt with that challenge, the next thing was the fact that the movie was just very dirty from age, with a few built-in problems. There were a few scenes that had slight movement in them, some jitter in the frame, and so we had to do some careful stabilization for that part of it.
“There were also some damaged sections and some missing frames. At the end of one reel, things were pretty chopped up and lost, so we ended up using alternating black-and-white dupe elements, made before the damage was present, and from a black-and-white print from the 1970s. So we had to put together elements from the fine grain that had no water damage with elements from a dupe negative and elements from a couple of prints. Our artists, Seth Berkowitz and Peter Yao, did an excellent job matching them all together.”
