F I LML IGHT | ADVERTI SEMENT FEATURE
ARCHIVE PRESERVATION Recognising that archive preservation will be an issue in years to come, FilmLight is guiding a research project – codename Arclight – to develop a scanner that’s capable of scanning any piece of film, regardless of gauge or number and position of perforations. The creation of Arclight hails from CNC, the French National Film Archive. CNC houses a collection of films ranging from 8mm, 90mm and all manner of gauges in between. These unique formats are incompatible with most modern scanning techniques, but the research FilmLight is undertaking hopes to find a solution to this. And fortunately for Kevin, the 70mm film footage he has from NASA fits FilmLight’s preservation research nicely. Chris Hall, who is leading the project at FilmLight, was given a test film containing shots from the Apollo era, including shots of the Apollo 11 launch itself. He was able to upload the film to the software and define an appropriate format for the dimensions
of the film frame and sprockets. He recalls, “The image area then came out as a square frame of just over 7000 lines: actually 7250x7250 pixels. That gave a very-high resolution scan of the images”. The process of scanning the film didn’t quite achieve the same instant fulfilment: “It started out opaque, but I was relieved to see the image of a rocket, on a launch stage, at night, clearly visible on the monitor,” says Hall. “Then suddenly, the film became almost as transparent as the rocket’s fire”. It was to be expected, owing to the nature of what the camera was aiming at, that the Ektachrome would become slightly exposed at this point. However, Hall reassured us that “this range of densities is always a challenge for a film scanner, but we are pleased with the image quality capturing the full, dynamic range. It’s very sharp, you can even zoom in on the rocket and read the words on there.” FilmLight was able to scan approximately 20 minutes of footage
ABOVE Chris Hall (right) led the project at FilmLight that developed the Arclight scanner.
for the producers of First Man , boosting Chazelle’s mission of achieving authenticity, and evoking the same admiration viewers watching it today would have felt watching it in 1969. For FilmLight, this is just the beginning of its (not so space-themed) odyssey, but this experience has increased the team’s understanding of the challenges surrounding digitising archive footage to the highest possible quality. “It gave us some encouragement that what we’ve got works for large format, high-quality material. It points the way forward for us that what we’ve made is applicable to archive film.”
MORE INFORMATION: www.filmlight.ltd.uk
FEBRUARY 20 1 9 | DEF I N I T ION 57
Powered by FlippingBook