Not everything ages well. Certainly not 50-year-old nitrate film, which can turn to jelly, or even burst into flames.
So producer Michael Dawson wasn't sure what he might find when he went looking for the missing negatives to Orson Welles' classic film Othello. After a "gallant struggle" he found the 35mm nitrate negatives in a New Jersey warehouse. But they'd been "horribly maintained," he says, "and they were in pretty bad shape."
How bad were they?
Some frames had lost a quarter of their image where the emulsion chipped off. Some frames were held together by pieces of masking tape. Some had suffered deep scratches, or endured what looked like liquid spills.
The sound track was another story. The top and bottom of the sound spectrum was cut off. Ambience and sound effects were missing. And much of the Shakespearean dialog was badly out of synch.
Why all these problems?
"Othello was done one on the cheap and on the fly," says Dawson.
Always pressed for money, Welles made the film in madcap stop-and-go fashion between 1948 and 1952. To save money on post-production, he used cut-rate suppliers in Europe.
"It was the kind of thing Welles was haunted by," adds Dawson. "As an independent outside the studio system, he had total creative control of his film. But unfortunately he lost technical control. In its original state, Othello was a hard film to follow."
Even so, critics have called Othello "one of the screen's sublime achievements" and "a masterwork in the finest sense". And it won the Grand Prize at the 1952 Cannes Film Festival.
In 1989, Dawson embarked on an ambitious project to restore the film. With a budget of US$1 million, it was perhaps the largest film restoration in history.
The initial re-release on VHS in 1992 was highly acclaimed. For this version, a new print was prepared from the nitrate negatives. The entire musical score was carefully transcribed and re-recorded by members of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. And the sound was re-synched.
But Dawson wanted to do more, especially with the visuals. For the 1999 re-release on DVD and laser disc, he approached Sensory Technologies near Chicago. Sensory does audio/video and multimedia production for clients such as McDonald's, Frito-Lay, Lucent Technologies, and Fox Sports.
To restore damaged frames in Othello, Sensory used a Flint advanced visual effects system from Autodesk Media and Entertainment.
"We concentrated on doing any big splotches visible to the eye," notes president Sean McKee, "plus any small specks on the same frames." In 15 days last spring, McKee and his partner Karen Sheehan did more than 100 restores, using the flint* cloning and blending features.
One sequence of a moving torch had deep scratches for several frames.
"That was a tough challenge, because the torch is moving and the camera is panning at the same time," recalls McKee. Since each frame is so different, he couldn't simply grab elements from nearby frames. Instead, he used the Flint tracking and AutoPaint features to fill in the scratches.
All in all, he found Flint "incredibly easy to use, and very intuitive. There really wasn't anything we couldn't do with it. And the client was immensely happy."
Producer Michael Dawson agrees.
"The Flint work went real well, and we're looking forward to working with Sensory on a number of other restorations," he says.
In fact, McKee just completed a test sequence for an upcoming restoration where Flint really came into play. The film is a German production called Jack the Ripper that starts with a four-second still shot of London Bridge.
"But it's so dirty, with so many scratches and red spots, that to paint each frame by hand would have been really difficult," says McKee. So he used Flint to seamlessly recreate the whole sequence. First, he created a gradient to match the colour of the original sky, then made a matte to match the London skyline. Next he digitally created water for the Thames River. He blended the new water with the original water's luminence values in the Action module to create realistic motion. After cleaning up one frame of the city, he put everything together in Flint -- "and now we have a perfect scene."
With advanced Discreet effects systems, skilled artists like McKee can reverse the ravages of time -- and bring a whole generation of classic films to today's audiences.
Discreet's Edit fit like a glove for Othello documentary
A 22-minute documentary is included with the 1999 re-release of Othello. And Sensory's Karen Sheehan used a Discreet Edit system to put it together.
The documentary shows the extensive work that went into the US$1 million restoration. Before-and-after shots reveal the scope of the visual retouching. The musical restoration is just as impressive. And Karen says it was a snap to edit the documentary on a Discreet system.
For instance, she found the auto-insert of transitions a major time-saver. "We had several hundred dissolves to do," she recalls. "So I selected the entire timeline, and just clicked one button to insert a dissolve at every single cut."
Over the past five years, Sheehan has worked on a number of different systems. "And Edit is way far ahead in productivity. I highly recommend it to anybody," she says, "It fits like a glove when you're editing."
