But that\u2019s a digression.\u00a0 The key point is the Seven Chances <\/em>had a Technicolor opening sequence.\u00a0 It\u2019s in two-color Technicolor from early in the days of the process, back when it was fairly unstable.\u00a0 Some years earlier, I\u2019d toyed with restoring the color from Kino\u2019s previous edition, and I had come up with some curves in Photoshop that got the color back to some semblance of the way it used to look.\u00a0 I had the file sitting dormant on my hard drive.<\/p>\n My friend, film historian Bruce Lawton, has been consulting with Kino on some of their new Buster Keaton Blu-Ray releases.\u00a0 He\u2019d let the producer of the new disc, Bret Wood, know about the work I\u2019d done on it.\u00a0 I knew that it had been delayed and pushed forward a number of times.\u00a0 I also knew that if they could do the restoration in-house, that they probably would, because that would be easier and cheaper.\u00a0 That was all great.<\/p>\n Finally, Bruce told me that they were making little headway with the color sequence.\u00a0 Bret sent me some notes and FedExed me the opening sequence at HD resolution from the material preserved at Library of Congress.<\/p>\n Let me back up and tell you that this was at the beginning of October 2011, the 7th to be exact.\u00a0 I\u2019ll also tell you that I don\u2019t work in film exclusively: I\u2019m also a computer consultant, with a degree in Electrical Engineering.\u00a0 On the morning of the 7th, I had gotten a call that a client of mine had had some printers fail on him, and I was obligated to spend the afternoon fixing them.\u00a0 The package from Bret arrived sometime in the afternoon.<\/p>\n Now, October is a crazy time for me.\u00a0 Everyone wants me to do Halloween movies, and this year was no exception. \u00a0I generally run all over my home state of Indiana doing shows. \u00a0I also consult and project with the Heartland Film Festival, and that was due to start on the 13th.\u00a0 I\u2019d also promised my supportive girlfriend that we were going to go off for 2-3 days, a long-delayed break from a hectic schedule.<\/p>\n And then the package arrived…<\/p>\n Well, I had the file, and notes on what I\u2019d done.\u00a0 How hard could it be?\u00a0 I was obligated to go out for our local art celebration that night, but not before I\u2019d snatched a quick look at the new files.<\/p>\n Instantly I realized why this was a problem.\u00a0 The material that I\u2019d recalibrated those years back was from a different print.\u00a0 The new one was faded beyond use.\u00a0 I could get only a very little color out of it.\u00a0 I went off to our artist party and pondered it.<\/p>\n I was about to give up on the whole thing.\u00a0 I thought that there probably was no hope for it.<\/p>\n Then I remembered something.\u00a0 It was from my engineering training.\u00a0 When American video was defined, it was designed to be compatible with older black and white TV.\u00a0 The color was designed to be overlaid on a standard black and white image.\u00a0 If I could take only the filtered color from the old print and overlay it on the new print, then it might do what we need!<\/p>\n Immediately I knew that this would be a lot of work.\u00a0 My girlfriend and I had been holding out hope that I might be able to do a belated one-day trip, but as this whole thing progressed, I realized that it probably wouldn\u2019t happen.\u00a0 I knew I\u2019d be lucky to get it done at all!<\/p>\n If you’re about to skip to the end, fearing this is an article with charts, graphs, and math, then fear not! \u00a0(I’ve been asked previously to keep this blog a math-free zone.) \u00a0I find this to be a human interest story, and I\u2019ve taken as much technical material out of this as I can. \u00a0All that\u2019s left is the bare bones to get the story across!\u00a0 If you\u2019d like to read a slightly more technical version, please refer to the\u00a0Nitrateville interview I did recently.<\/a> You can also feel free to ask questions in the comments.<\/p>\n I knew what the calculations would be.\u00a0 I got Kino\u2019s new video file, located the same frame in my older file, and I realigned the color by hand.\u00a0 Frankly, I was amazed.\u00a0 It looked better than the old restoration I had tried, because the new print was so much sharper.<\/p>\n But that was ONE FRAME.\u00a0 The whole thing is 4440 frames! (I just looked it up, so there.) Bret had already told me that Kino had to have this on Monday the 10th.<\/p>\n How could I possibly do this in such a short time?\u00a0 I had to think about it.<\/p>\n When I awoke, I tried several different programs to try to automate this process.\u00a0 Nothing worked too well.\u00a0 Frankly, the amount of computation was pretty severe, and it slowed my computer down quite a bit (I have a very fast home-brew computer… remember I\u2019m an engineer.)<\/p>\n I worked on it all day with varying degrees of success.\u00a0 Nothing was very promising.\u00a0 Most of the ideas I had involved processes that would simply take longer to run than the time I had left.<\/p>\n By Saturday night, I just about gave up on the whole thing. \u00a0I fell asleep at about 3am, upset and dejected.<\/p>\n I woke up Sunday morning to find that my computer had locked up and, despite the fact that I had carefully saved everything, I still needed 2-3 hours to get back to where I\u2019d been.\u00a0 I figured out a better method, but it required me hand-clicking the mouse over every frame, 4440 times.<\/p>\n I couldn\u2019t look at the restoration while I was doing it, so I clicked away and discovered the whole thing was horribly misaligned.\u00a0 Well, this takes about 3 hours just to run, so off for another shot.<\/p>\n Round two was much better, but still not usable.\u00a0 Three more hours.\u00a0 Round three worked pretty well, but the alignment between the sources drifted a little as it progressed, so it was necessary to readjust at about the halfway point. Another ninety minutes<\/em>.\u00a0 Time was tight.<\/p>\n Round three and a half: alignment was finally decent, and color fairly good.<\/p>\n It was now late Sunday night.\u00a0 I had not left the house or showered in over two days.<\/p>\n I finally had a pretty good color version, but I had to get it to Bret, and it was 700MB (very very large)!\u00a0 I set it for overnight upload, and I hoped they could get it in time.\u00a0 By Monday morning, I had another idea for a slight update, which I did.\u00a0 It arrived by Monday afternoon.\u00a0 I know that my results were further corrected in Kino\u2019s color suite, but I only had time to send what I had!<\/p>\n Bruce and Ken Gordon finished recording their commentary, which Bruce then feverishly edited and uploaded for Bret, and so ended a long weekend. \u00a0Wrong. \u00a0Bret was excited enough about my results on the color sequence that he wanted me to record a commentary for it. \u00a0By this time, I was in the midst of 16+ hour days at the Heartland Film Festival, so I came home, recorded a little, and tried again. \u00a0I hope it sounds okay. \u00a0I fear I sounded like a horrid idiot, but I was wiped out! \u00a0I slept very hard in November… trust me!<\/p>\n Now, why did I do this?\u00a0 For the money?\u00a0 For the glory?\u00a0 Hah, hardly.<\/p>\n I had a moment of insight on that Friday night that I\u2019ll share with you.\u00a0 I realized (as did Bruce) that I might be the only person in the world who could and would do this restoration.\u00a0 I know that sounds pompous, but it really isn\u2019t.\u00a0 My girlfriend remembers discussing this with me and encouraging me to go on with the project. \u00a0She felt so strongly that I should pursue this that she was willing to give up the vacation. \u00a0 \u00a0It needed someone familiar with early Technicolor, a competent computer user, a guy who knows how complex non-linear color filtering works, and someone who cared enough to lose a complete weekend doing it.<\/p>\n I thought that there might not be another person who could do this, and I feared that if I didn\u2019t do it, then it might never be done.<\/p>\n That\u2019s why I had a lost weekend with Buster. \u00a0Bruce and Bret wanted him to shine in color once again. \u00a0So did I.<\/p>\n Thanks to Kino\/Lorber for permission to use these images and to Bruce Lawton for finding the rare stills.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I\u2019m going to apologize in advance for this departing from my usual blog format.\u00a0 I normally like to do reviews or some sort of film thing, but this is mostly about me.\u00a0 Still, it\u2019s about film preservation, and I think it\u2019s a worthy thing to discuss. I\u2019d been aware for some time that Kino\/Lorber was … Continue reading “The Lost Weekend With Buster”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"powered_cache_disable_cache":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[207,4],"tags":[70,66,69,36,67,68],"class_list":["post-157","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-film","category-views-and-reviews","tag-blu-ray","tag-eric-grayson","tag-kino","tag-restoration","tag-seven-chances","tag-technicolor"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=157"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":173,"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/157\/revisions\/173"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=157"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=157"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=157"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.drfilm.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/12\/BK_Seven_Chances_05.jpg\" "\\"Three")
<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a>Bruce got my sample frame, and was very enthused about the prospect of resurrecting the sequence. But now I had to figure out how to automate it.\u00a0\u00a0I decided to go to bed and get a little sleep.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n