Cinerama Color recovery examples |
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| Written by: Dave Strohmaier | Date: 24.02.2013 |
 Faded Eastman color original scan.
The curved frame line is to correct for original 27mm lens distortionWhere we had several areas of missing negatives in "Seven Wonders", "South Seas Adventure" as well as the next title "Search for Paradise" we were able to go to the Library of Congress original deposit Eastman color prints stored there since the mid 1950s and scan these areas off of the faded prints. So the Library of Congress has been a major partner in these digital restorations as is Image Trends in Austin Texas, the company doing the scanning. Everyone is doing this work a severely reduced rates in order to make these digital restorations possible. A film history forensics project you might say. |
More in 70mm reading: Cinerama Festival Diary 2012 in70mm.com's Cinerama page Internet link: |
 Image Trends color recovery with their special softwareEvery Cinerama film was advertised as being in Technicolor but for the 4 travelogues, that came after "This Is Cinerama", that was not exactly true, that lab that was used was Technicolor in New York but it was not IB Technicolor (which does not fade to pink or magenta as Eastman color does). This was done so that each original print shipped to the theaters was struck off of the original camera negatives for a first generation image on the screen. |
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 Andrew’s color adjustments and enhancementsThe problem with this procedure was that the negatives got much more wear and tear than any major studio negative ever had, so the restoration challenge was much greater not to mention 3 times more complicated due to 3 images making up a Cinerama frame. Here is an example of the color recovery that is being done on "Seven Wonders". Image Trends, our scanning and compositing company does a great job of recovering as much as they can from the scanned LOC print then our colorist Andrew Balis takes that image and on some new software can tweak it to hone it in what you see here. Some shots come out better than others and that can often depend on the original photography besides the level of color fading. |
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 Faded Eastman color original scan |
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 Image Trends color recovery with their special software |
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 Andrew’s color adjustments and enhancements |
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