akagi1945
Member
What Hi-Fi ran a piece this week from inside Silver Salt Studios in London, the outfit behind restorations of Hammer titles including The Curse of Frankenstein and the 1995 Pride and Prejudice. Worth reading if you have ever grumbled about paying thirty quid for a catalogue 4K of a film that came out before you were born.
The part that stuck with me was the very first stage, before anything digital happens. Someone sits with the original negative on an inspection bench and goes through it looking for damage. Their example was a 1954 title, The Men of Sherwood Forest, and the list of problems included a stamp printed into one frame, missing sprocket holes along the edge, scratches, tears, and mould from decades sat in an archive. Cleaning means running the reel through a machine that winds it around buffers to lift surface dirt, and hand-cleaning where the mould has really taken hold. Then it goes to the scanner. That is one person, one reel, before a single restoration artist opens a workstation.
Which reframes the pricing argument a bit for me. The thirty quid is not the disc, it is that bench. It also explains why the bad ones are bad in the specific way they are. When a label wants a catalogue title on the shelf by Christmas and will not fund that inspection stage, you get the digital shortcut instead, noise reduction cranked until faces go waxy and the grain structure disappears. Cheaper, faster, and permanent for anyone who buys it.
What is on your shelf that clearly got the full treatment, and what obviously got the rush job?
The part that stuck with me was the very first stage, before anything digital happens. Someone sits with the original negative on an inspection bench and goes through it looking for damage. Their example was a 1954 title, The Men of Sherwood Forest, and the list of problems included a stamp printed into one frame, missing sprocket holes along the edge, scratches, tears, and mould from decades sat in an archive. Cleaning means running the reel through a machine that winds it around buffers to lift surface dirt, and hand-cleaning where the mould has really taken hold. Then it goes to the scanner. That is one person, one reel, before a single restoration artist opens a workstation.
Which reframes the pricing argument a bit for me. The thirty quid is not the disc, it is that bench. It also explains why the bad ones are bad in the specific way they are. When a label wants a catalogue title on the shelf by Christmas and will not fund that inspection stage, you get the digital shortcut instead, noise reduction cranked until faces go waxy and the grain structure disappears. Cheaper, faster, and permanent for anyone who buys it.
What is on your shelf that clearly got the full treatment, and what obviously got the rush job?
