Restoration in a Digital Age

It is a common misconception that only old black and white films from the 30s and 40s require film restoration. This simply isn't true, now with the demands and standards placed upon the industry with the requirement for high quality HD programming, films produced as little as 8 years ago will require some form of restoration to make them look their best before being released on High Definition platforms.

JCA has now established itself as one of the leading film restoration companies with high profile movies such as David Lean's "Brief Encounter" and Len Deighton's "The Ipcress File".

Evaluation

Before transferring the film to the digital environment, each reel is bench checked for any problems that cause further damage to the film in the transfer process. All elements are then ultrasonically cleaned, to remove any surface dirt and dust.

The reels are then either scanned or telecined to HDCAM-SR 444 or scanned directly as HD, 2K or 4K data. Once a route is selected the transfer will be handled personally by our grading department to ensure that the best obtainable quality is captured from the material.

Digital Restoration

Once all the material is transferred to digital data, a restoration process is started. The core of JCA's workflow is the Pixel Farm's PFClean restoration package. This package is designed for the clean and repair of film for digital intermediate and film restoration. This is a hugely flexible application for restoration on material from SD to 4K but JCA will at all times utilise multiple software solutions to gain the best results possible according to the needs of the original material.

All forms of common film restoration problems such as dirt, dust, warps, scratches, tears, flicker or even missed frames can be repaired within a completely non-linear, non-destructive workflow to produce clean digital image data without affecting the original scan or digitised sequence.

Where possible, new title and credit sequences or subtitles and graphics are digitally reconstructed and composited to match or surpass the original versions.

Each film is then graded to bring the film's colour back to it's former glory ready for playout to tape or film.