Classic Answer to Film Preservation
By CHRISTOPHER KEOUGH
Staff Reporter
Old movies don’t die, their dye just fades.
To date, bringing back the brilliance has been an often costly and tedious proposition. Veteran Hollywood visual effects man Peter Kuran wants to change all that with his invention, Restored Color Imaging.
RCI has shown signs of being embraced by a Hollywood eager to preserve a legacy of film classics like “Seven Year Itch” and “An Affair to Remember” before they fade into oblivion.
While the technology is not yet widely used, RCI is under consideration by the Scientific and Technical Awards Committee of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for an Academy Award next year.
The photochemical RCI process is stunningly simple. So simple, in fact, that it has been possible pretty much since the advent of color film, but no one ever put two and two together.
Kuran, who runs visual effects studio VCE Inc. in Sylmar, would probably not have devoted much thought to film preservation had it not been for an interaction with the U.S. Department of Defense, of all places. The issue arose when the military, which was lending him archived footage for a documentary he was making about the atomic bomb, asked about color degradation in its archive footage.
“It was one of those things where they said, ‘If you think there’s anything you can do with this, here it is,'” Kuran said.
That’s when the seeds of RCI took root.
Trumping digital
“This is nice,” said David Cipes of film preservation company Cinetech, sitting down to a demonstration reel of RCI in action. “It’s real; none of this digital bupkes.”
Cinetech licensed Kuran’s invention and spent $250,000 to simplify it by making modifications to printing and processing equipment and slicing the number of steps in the process.
“It’s much more efficient and it’s probably cheaper,” Cipes said of RCI. “Digital takes a lot of time because you’re going frame by frame and you still have to output it to film.”
To get an idea of what happens when the color in a motion picture fades, Kuran suggests considering a colorful poster that’s been left in the sun. The blues fade and whites take on a yellow tinge.
While preservation efforts remain rare, most modern color restoration is done digitally. Until RCI, the only way to photochemically restore color was if the studio created three-color separations of the negative shortly after the original film was shot.
That’s why movies shot in Technicolor “Gone With the Wind” and “The Wizard of Oz,” for example are virtually timeless, Kuran said. Eastman Kodak Co.’s Technicolor process, in which movies were shot on three separate pieces of film, ended up being short-lived as Hollywood was quick to embrace a new single-system film format that allowed the studios to lose the bulky equipment and cumbersome processes that came with Technicolor.
Kuran’s RCI is a traditional photochemical process that uses a negative of the original film, with highlights neutralized, and a newly created film with corrected colors to create a third film that becomes the restored product.
Building a client base
Cinetech’s Cipes used to work at the other main player in the color restoration world: L.A.-based Cinesite, a Kodak subsidiary. Officials at Cinesite, which uses a proprietary digital restoration method, declined to be interviewed, saying it would be inappropriate to comment on competing technology.
Joseph Olivier, vice president of restoration at Cinetech, said Kuran made fast friends at Cinetech when he showed off his discovery.
“The first time we saw the results we were all giggling because we thought it was such an amazing thing,” Olivier said. “It’s a lot more pure than going to digital. This is not easy, but I think it’s easier than digital.”
Kuran got his start in the movies as a student at California Institute for the Arts in Valencia. It was there that he learned about “a movie being made by the guy who made ‘American Graffiti.'” A year-and-a-half into classes, Kuran left to work for George Lucas on “Star Wars.”
After working on “Empire Strikes Back,” Kuran, now 45, wanted to do more experimentation and started VCE.
The RCI process is a separate venture for Kuran, independent of VCE. He likes the idea of licensing products that continue to pay off, such as footage from his atomic bomb documentaries. He also recently pulled in $20,000 in one shot when he licensed music from “Trinity and Beyond” for the trailer to “Rush Hour 2.”
So far Cinetech is Kuran’s only RCI customer, but considering that Cinetech does a about half the color restoration work in Hollywood, it’s not a bad deal. Kuran licenses the process at a rate of 10 cents a foot. With the typical film coming in at about 10,000 feet, Kuran makes $1,000 per movie restored.
Rami Mina, a film restoration consultant who works with Paramount and other Hollywood studios, said RCI’s greatest advantage is its ability to evenly correct color where it is faded unevenly.
“The process is unique because this technology brings back the dye in the proportion with which it faded,” Mina said.
Mina also is a believer in RCI over digital.
“Digital is always present, but you need to scan an image and bring it back to film,” Mina said. “Photochemical techniques are much closer to the original and seamless.”
Nowadays the modifier “digital” nearly always indicates a newer, better method of doing things. Kuran said the old-fashioned hands-on RCI process beats digital color restoration for several reasons. The main objection Kuran has with digital manipulation of film, which he used to practice, is the integrity of the image itself.
In digital restoration, the film has to be scanned to create a digital image on a computer. That image is then changed digitally adding information to it, creating what Kuran calls “noise.” Then it has to be reconverted to film.
“However, having done it both ways, now I see that the dark areas lose detail. They’re just not as refined,” Kuran said. “It’s costly, it’s expensive and you lose data. You modify the image.”
