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Variety (10/May/2005) - Restoration: An art in the making

(c) Variety (10/May/2005)

Restoration: An art in the making

"One day, while working on our first restoration, North by Northwest, we spotted wires on a plane in the crop-dusting sequence," says John Lowry, chief of Lowry Digital Images. "I had to decide whether to remove them, and I asked myself, 'What would Hitchcock have wanted?'"

The art of film restoration involves many creative moments such as this one. The process also includes several weeks (or months) of hard work per title, along with an exceptional dedication to detail on both image and sound.

Tom Regal, restoration manager for Universal Studios' BluWave Audio facility, is an expert in the field of audio restoration. The BluWave facility is best known for its restorations of Universal's library of classics, which includes Paramount's Golden Age output and such modern Universal blockbusters as E.T.

One of the many projects Regal has supervised is the restoration of the Universal "monster movies" of the '30s and '40s for release on DVD. "Those films were in pretty good shape for that era. We worked from second-generation prints on those titles," he says.

Audio restoration, according to Regal, "is done in layers. We peel off layers of sound, getting rid of ticks, pops and other anomalies, until we reach the noise floor. A track from the '30s is going to have a certain noise floor, and there is only so far we can go back while still being cautious not to remove any part of the track that should be there."

Regal's next major project is the Universal Hitchcock titles, including The Birds, Marnie and Psycho. "Audio restoration was done on Rear Window and Vertigo years ago, but we're looking forward to working on these titles, especially Psycho — we have the original dialog, music and effects tracks for that. We aren't going to remix it as much as remaster it."

During the last five years, Lowry has streamlined his restoration process so that current jobs are completed in about a month. His most visually striking restoration, Disney's Bambi, took "a number of months because we had to develop a number of automatic software solutions to deal with cell animation," he explains.

The hardest films to restore, according to Lowry, are black and white classics. "We went through hell with Citizen Kane, as the two best sources were still very dirty and had lots of jitter and blemishes," he recalls. Lowry is proud of the "respectable job" his company did with the film, but does note with chagrin that "we erased raindrops in one sequence and got lots of letters as a result — we've learned a lot since then!"

These days, the company consults with a film's owner on every issue — even "mistakes," Lowry says. "We found visible wires in Mary Poppins and a faulty bluescreen in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. In both cases, we called up the client and asked, 'Do you want to fix this?'"

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