Cineric, Inc.:Press Release!

Although total digital restoration of feature films is still prohibitively costly, a New York City company called Cineric Inc. is using computer technology and photochemical processes to preserve and restore disappearing color-film treasures. Balázs Nyari, founder and president of Cineric, says that unlike many companies that do preservation and restoration work, Cineric’s specialty grew directly out of the principals’ visual-effects expertise. "Most restoration and preservation companies come from a lab background," he notes. "Our approach to restoration is a direct outgrowth of our experience in the Star Wars-era of visual effects [during the late 1970s and early ‘80s]. As an optical cameraman, you had to know how to perfectly line up a matte and precisely register [multiple film elements]."

'This experience, along with "the special skills required to make composited scenes come to life onscreen," accounts for much of Cineric’s expertise in rescuing damaged film elements, Nyari explains. Several of the company’s principals were enlisted for the visual-effects team of the 1982 computer-game fantasy film Tron. Later, they thought they might have success adapting techniques used on that film for restoration work. "We asked ourselves if the color-mask techniques we used to obtain better color saturation and deeper blacks on Tron could be used in film restoration," Nyari recalls. "That was the origin of Cineric’s proprietary color-fading restoration approach."

To correct serious color fading, Cineric focuses on the yellow emulsion layer. "The yellow layer is the first to fade," Nyari explains, adding that such fading gives deep shadows a blue cast and turns the whites and highlights yellowish. "If it is faded 50 percent or less, we can make a color mask that re-creates that missing information." Cineric has created film-length yellow layers for such classics as Bell, Book and Candle and The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad. Magenta and cyan information is also added as needed, but to a much lesser degree.

Tom Heitman, Cineric’s director of preservation and restoration, declined to explain how the yellow matte is created, saying only that it is a proprietary photographic process made more efficient by the use of a great deal of computing power. Grover Crisp, vice president of asset management and film restoration for Sony Pictures Entertainment, says the Bell, Book and Candle restoration was "very successful. Cineric is at the forefront [in terms of restoring faded color films]. They are constantly trying to improve [those tools]."

However, Cineric does not simply replace faded color layers. Its technicians also work from whatever material is available to create new, pristine masters of beat-up classics. Crisp notes that another long-term Cineric project is the nearly completed restoration of the Barbra Streisand vehicle Funny Girl. "Tom Heitman took the lead in reconstructing a negative that was in very bad shape," Crisp notes. "Substandard duped portions and poor opticals had been cut in," and the original camera negative was badly worn, having been used to make more than 200 initial prints.

Heitman worked from YCM separation masters (made from the original Eastman Color negative at the time of the film’s release) and several IPs, among other elements, to create B-rolls to replace the inferior sections of the original negative. The finished product will be release-printed using Technicolor’s new version of its old imbibition dye-sublimation process. "Funny Girl is going to look fabulous," Crisp enthuses.

Nyari proudly notes that his company has a few other proprietary tricks up its sleeve. One of Cineric’s central methods brings to mind the Hippocratic oath’s familiar phrase, "First, do no harm." Multiple runs of old negatives, nitrate film, YCM separations, internegatives and interpositives create wear and tear on already fragile film, so Cineric devised its Single-Pass System, a way to evaluate the restoration needs of an entire feature based on a single optical-printer run, as opposed to the six or seven unspoolings typically needed. This is possible thanks to Cineric’s Cinebase software program. Cinebase automatically prints seven frames from each of a film’s cuts (the first and last frames and five frames in between) during the first run through one of the company’s two Oxberry 1100 series optical printers.

The resultant seven-frame-per-cut element is then analyzed, timed, re-registered and color-corrected. "[Then] cinex test prints are made until we are satisfied with the result," Nyari details. This system is so reliable, he adds, that very often "our first answer print is the last print." (At the same time, he acknowledges that it is not always possible to make a proper analysis from only seven frames per cut. That, he says, is where the company’s expertise in analyzing color film by eye comes into play.)

Another key tool in the Cineric arsenal is the full-immersion, adjustable liquid gate, which the company helped to invent, Heitman says. "To the best of our knowledge, we have three of the four adjustable liquid gates in the world," he maintains. Nyari explains that an adjustable liquid gate allows severely shrunken film to be easily realigned for optical printing via registration pins that can be set as small as a two-perf pull-down. Liquid gates are common film-restoration tools; they handle film gently and prevent slight scratches and holes that have not intruded into the color layers from showing up when the original is copied. According to Heitman, the original runs through perchlore-thylene in the special gate. Perchlore-thylene has the same light-refraction value as the film, so it prevents the light from bouncing off of the edges of the defects, rendering them invisible to the copy film.

Another Cineric specialty is preservation and restoration of Techniscope non-anamorphic wide-screen films, which is facilitated by the adjustable liquid gates. Techniscope, now essentially an abandoned film format, uses a two-perf pull-down; a tiny 1:23.5 widescreen image is exposed onto the film using spherical lenses. The company’s most notable such assignment was George Lucas’s 1973 smash hit American Graffiti, for which Cineric created an answer print with new timings in the late 1980s. (Nyari calls the assignment more of a preservation than a restoration). "The old timings don’t work with the new release stocks," Heitman notes. Cineric also did preservation work on Lucas’s first feature, the cerebral 1971 sci-fi thriller THX 1138, which was also shot in the Techniscope format. In addition, the company recently restored several Techniscope titles from the legendary British Hammer horror archives, including Curse of the Mummy’s Tomb, which had just been completed at press time.

Film restoration and preservation, however, is only part of Cineric’s business. Its primary specialties are visual effects and titles, including work on such recent high-profile projects as the 2000 remake of Shaft, Martin Scorsese’s Bringing Out the Dead, and last year’s surprise smash The Sixth Sense. They also do digital scene restoration, video-to-film transfers, film recording of digital images and blow-ups from 16mm to 35mm, including the recent American Movie and The Daytrippers. "There is always something at Sundance from Cineric," Nyari quips.