Marc Wielage
Forum Replies Created
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Lots of secondaries, lots of precise keying, some power windows, careful saturation, lots of experimentation… but a great deal of the approach depends on the nature of the original footage. There is no easy answer.
As one example of the opposite — turning beautiful spring footage into brown, dreary fall — check out Julius Friede’s excellent work on “O Brother, Where Art Thou,” which was done on the old daVinci 2K at Cinesite back in 2000. That work still holds up very well today.
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Flip back and forth between the new scene and a still-frame of the same shot, and that’ll give you all the reference you need. You need both scopes and a monitor you can trust to precisely balance shots. I’ve never been able to work with the built-in scopes within daVinci — I gotta have external scopes.
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I would add that an old, faded color print is a very bad source for a video transfer. Surely a decent IP or a negative is available somewhere. What I’ve seen in the past with Imagica scanners is that they tend to clip with sense material, particularly prints. They’re fine with camera negative or inter negative. My personal preference is Si the Northlight scanners, which I think deliver a better picture overall. The DFT scanners are also good provided you get he pin-reg option (which will be dodgy with very old material).
If the yellow and cyan layers have faded, the problem with the magenta that remains is that it’s going to have a lot of color & density “breathing” issues. Even if you can create or duplicate the bad color layers, it’s going to be unstable unless you have very sophisticated processing available.
I have seen cases where a missing color record from a 3-strip nitrate project was missing or very badly damaged, and they were able to reconstruct it enough that the resultant color was acceptable. But we’re talking pixel-by-pixel mapping over a period of months and months… not simple and not cheap.