Restoration Feature in Televisual Magazine

The restoration of five art house classics from Russian filmmakers Andrei Tarkovsky was the brief for Dubbs|Eyeframe, which was tasked with bringing them all up to a consistent level of quality under the supervision of Artificial Eye’s Richard Mortiboys. The five films included Ivan's Childhood, Mirror, Stalker, Solaris and Andrei Rublev – some in better condition than others. Eyeframe’s Simon Marbrook explains that the Russian authorities dislike of the filmmaker, who was seen as a troublemaker later in his career, hasn’t made the job of restoring his work any easier, because his work has not been preserved as diligently as the work of other state-approved filmmakers.

“We had an Andrei Rublev master over from Russia that was fairly good quality so we had to make sure that all the other films could match up to that,” explains Marbrook, who set to work on Digibeta masters flown over from Russia. “The art of restoration is making the best of the best material you can get hold of,” adds Dubbs|Eyeframe’s director of sales and marketing James Greenwall.

“Across the series of films there was every kind of problem,” recalls Marbrook, “from density fluctuations in the film which can cause colour shifts, to drop outs, stains and scratches on the original. We also had to deal with a fair bit of noise – a lot of the films were quite hissy – so we have removed that and have enhanced the audio slightly.”

The main tools for the job were Archangel HD for deflicker, image stabilisation, de-hissing and dust removal and MTI for individual frame repairs.

Says Marbrook: “The main improvement was on deflickering but on some films there was a lot of mark removal – 70,000 in the case of Solaris, which is one film we expect to attract a lot of interest stimulated by the George Clooney-fronted remake.”

Article taken from Televisual Magazine, May 2011