Cinerama "Seven Wonders" Digital Restoration documentary

Wow, this is a really fascinating (though very technical) brand-new 15-minute documentary on how David Strohmaier's crew recently put Cinerama's Seven Wonders of the World back together:



I had no idea that the internegatives for the process actually combined all three screen images into one roll of film! That's an amazingly-complicated process, given that each of those three sets of frames (A image, B image, C image) would have to be struck onto separate prints for the theater. Only by keeping the entire negative as one roll of film could they make sure that the three images wouldn't age or deteriorate separately.

What's doubly-stunning is that somebody went in and cut out all the B images to make a TV version back in the 1960s, and these guys had to put the entire puzzle back together! That's a job so overwhelming, it makes my head hurt.

 

That's an excellent, lucid presentation. I do appreciate it when behind-the-scenes type of programs actually go into some technical detail rather than being just a gee-whiz puff piece.

I found it curious that they couldn't remove the fly completely from the film - that sort of frame cloning/pasting would be pretty easy I would think.

Also, throughout I've noticed slight discoloration at the edges of the joined 3-frames. Why didn't they fix that better? In fact, right at the end where the finished movie is being shown to the audience, there were all manner dark vertical lines all over the screen. What's that about??

 

And here's another documentary on the reconstruction of Cinerama's Search for Paradise:



The before & after color correction is the type of stuff I do every day, and I'm glad to see these guys actually showing how meticulous and difficult it is. In a lot of cases, I would have bent the image a lot further, but I get that there are practical limits to how much time & money they can spend, plus there's always a case of taste and personal preference as to how the final image should look. Note that in all of these cases, they can't refer back to the original prints as reference because they've all turned to crap. All you can do in this case is make the whites white, the blacks black, and try to push the midrange to something approaching normal.

They did a really, really good job pin-registering the images together so the "join-lines" between the Cinerama frames -- which has always been a huge problem for me -- have been greatly minimized. I think they could've blurred the edges more, but again, it's a question of how much time and money you can spend. It's very possible ten times more money would have only made the final image look maybe 10-15% better, and at some point nobody can justify spending it.

 

As an independent restoration specialist working apart from the major studios, Mr. Strohmeier has considerably more limited financial resources with which he can work his technical wizardry...certain things had to be left as they were because he didn't have the funds to pay for the work...

 

Thanks for the links, Vidiot. Fascinating to watch, for sure.

One thing I'm left wondering is how the missing color information is digitally recreated. Are they able to extract and enhance a small remaining amount of the faded colors, or is there some guesswork going on that recreates from scratch what the color information would have been?

 

All of the Flicker Alley Cinerama Blu-rays are essential viewing. Having seen many faded and mismatched Cinerama films at the Seattle Cinerama, it's a revelation to see them with proper colors and no join lines.

I just wish I had a bigger TV to watch them on.

 

Yes to both! In some cases, they're able to use the Red color record to regenerate the missing Blue and Green information. As long as you can still make white and still make black, the mids can sorta/kinda fall into place, provided you've solved the flicker/color instability problem.

My guess is that they might have resisted doing that much historical revisionism by removing it completely. If it's still a little bit there, then they haven't changed the film too much.

I felt the same way, but unless I was actually in the room, I can't say how easy or difficult it would've been to do a better fix. Some of those lock-down shots definitely could have been improved, but it could well have been a time & money thing.

 

In the documentary for the recent Cinerama Holiday in Spain Blu-ray release, they have a pretty good demonstration on how they recover the lost color.

 

LOL, so you're saying that originally, the director wanted to have the fly in the frame?

 

There's always a discussion about how much to change a film, especially if a flaw has been in there since day one. I know of a whole slew of Disney "experts" who are angry that in the HD remasters, a decision was made to remove the cell dirt in the animation and not just the negative dirt in the film. Me, I think they're crazy, but this is how nutty film people can be.

 

Cinemaphiles can be the very definition of the term "anal-retentive", Marc...

 

Oh, I've never found that to be the case...

 

Fantastic feature, Bravo to the folks who are caring for and preserving the films today and archiving back ups for the future generations!!

 

Agreed. I never thought I'd see the day when we'd have practically all of the three-strip Cinerama films nicely restored and available on home video.

For anyone who doesn't have them yet, Flicker Alley's currently running a sale through the 25th on a combo pack of SEARCH FOR PARADISE and SEVEN WONDERS OF THE WORLD. The Cinerama Blu-rays aren't often discounted very much, and this is about the best deal I've seen yet for these particular titles:

http://www.flickeralley.com/catalog/item/cinerama-combo-pack/hardgood

 

Those aren't internegatives, those are the original camera negatives. Clever solution to improving the color matching between panels for each segment though! Run the giant reel through one batch of film and chemicals and cut them into three reels when you're done. It was scary watching them unspool the film and hearing the cracking lacquer! Thanks for posting that, Vidiot!

Derek

 

They can't do that, Derek, because then there would be a splice every single frame, which is not possible given that there's a piece of emulsion lost every time you splice 35mm negative. It has to be a dupe negative or an internegative or an interpositive.

Or are they doing it shot for shot? Either way, it's bizarre.

 

Actually, IB Tech prints of "This Is Cinerama", "How The West Was Won", and "The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm" were made, but only IB prints of the first two have survived in private collections.

Derek

 

The print of The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm that Matt and I saw at the Ceramic Dome in LA a couple of years ago was pretty faded and chewed up from what I remember (and reviewed at the time). If that's Tech IB, it really got whacked in the last 50+ years.

 

To the best of my knowledge, no IB prints of Grimm have survived. They were produced back then though. Only the three titles I mentioned ever had IB Tech prints made of them.

Derek

 

Dave Strohmaier says in the documentary that Cinerama used the original negatives for the prints. The cans are not marked as dupes either. Go figure...

Derek

 

Vidiot, I think the abc rolls have each camera's negative reel end to end on one reel. Not alternating every frame. Am I interpreting you correctly?

 

End to end or shot for shot? It's bizarre any way you look at it. It would technically work, but trying to get it all to time out and line up is a mess. And I still think that chemically, the material at the top of the roll is going to fade differently from the material in the center of the roll, especially over 50-60 years. Even the splices themselves have a chemical reaction to the adjacent emulsion layers.

There were similar issues with 3-strip Technicolor back in the day, because it was quickly discovered that the 3 rolls of film would age and shrink at different rates -- even as little as a year later. Disney got around this by shooting their films using one frame per color (Red, Green, and Blue), then using a special printer to strike the final dupes and prints. This way, one reel held all the color records for the entire reel. Even this is very cumbersome and non-standard.

If they're splicing 3 10-minute Cinerama reels together, it could work, but it's still bizarre. I noticed that they were using 1" cores, which is already very unusual for a lab film element. This puts more stress on the layers and makes the entire roll much more wobbly.

I guess I'm just reacting to Cinerama being a very, very bizarre and non-standard system in terms of lab practices. On the other hand, the guys doing the restoration have at least figured out a way to deal with it and get it all conformed. The most interest part to me is that they were able to get reference 35mm Cinerama prints out of the U.S. Copyright Office and plug the holes in the films that way.

 

End to end was how I understood it. If you filmed a single scene with three negatives, you'd put the c reel on, then a, then b. Although, for a feature, it'd be longer sections of the film than just a scene. It is weird, but I guess I understand why they did it. For consistency among the panels.