Restoring a film is a grave challenge! But Reliance MediaWorks continues to master and grow with each challenge like this and has cleared the very recent one by digitally restoring the 1981 Farooq Shaikh and Deepti Naval Starrer romantic comedy Chasme- Buddoor.
Till date Reliance MediaWorks has digitized and restored over 1700 films, reels and documentaries ranging between the years 1899 to 2012.
In the month of January this year, Producer of Chashme Buddoor, Jayashree Makhija approached Reliance Mediaworks for seeking their expertise for restoring the movie. The need to restore the movie came about as film negatives were in about to die stage and Jayashree wanted to restore it for preservation and to be able to showcase it in film resolution.
Producer Jayshree Makhija states, “Chashme-Buddoor is very close to my heart, however unfortunately the film negatives were in about to die status which I wanted to preserve and share. I realized that Reliance MediaWorks is a global player with one of the largest and technologically advanced dedicated restoration and post production house bringing experience, expertise and scale. Reliance was hence chosen as a reliable partner for us, to not only restore from all the ageing effects, but also to brighten the look through the advanced coloring process.”
The Team at Reliance MediaWorks has taken less than a month to complete the work on this film by starting the restoration work for this movie in the month of February. The entire film was in a bad condition and required extensive frame by frame manual restoration rather than few shots or sequences.
Speaking to Animationxpress.com’s Zeenia Boatwala about the restoration work done by Reliance MediaWorks, Naresh Jhangiani, President Business Enterprise Management, says, “Chashme Buddoor is one of the most iconic films of the 1980s, and we were all excited to hear about restoration of this film. The brief given to us was that the film negative is in a bad condition and we did a preliminary assessment of the film elements and the image condition to judge the technical feasibility and the efforts required for restoration of the film.”
The team at Reliance MediaWorks followed a two tier strategy to complete work on the film with the first strategy being to preserve the film at highest resolution and the second one was to restore the film within the budget available.
Explaining more about the restoration process, Naresh Adds, “The process included Scanning of film @4K resolution to get maximum depth out of the film negative and archival preservation. The files were then converted to 2K resolution for further processing including Pre Grading, Picture Restoration, Image Enhancement & Final Color Grading. Audio was simultaneously restored and converted to pseudo 5.1 from mono tracks. The restored image and audio files were then processed for making a Digital Cinema Print as per the DCI specifications.
Almost 90 percent of the film contained heavy stains on it and the film was composed with various challenges due to the extremely high level of green stains and fungus. Almost half the frames of the film were covered with such stains along with other errors like Dirt, Scratches, Unsteadiness, Flicker, Warps, gate Hair, Static Dirt.
The Academy Award winning proprietary software of Reliance MediaWorks named ‘Obsidion’ was used to enhance the quality of the image and the colorist at Reliance MediaWorks worked closely with the DOP to get the film back to its original look and intent.
Naresh adds more, “The movie required efforts amounting to thousands of Man-hours including extensive frame by frame manual restoration to restore the film to pristine level.”
“Although the time was a constraint due to the release of the film but with the technologies including proprietary toolsets incorporated in the state of the art facility, dynamic processes, scale of operations and highly experienced skilled technicians, the whole film was restored to pristine level in less than 3 weeks. ” Naresh, adds further
A team of 80 artists have worked for restoring the movie to its original look and feel and in the work process adopted by team at Reliance MediaWorks, the scanned images were assessed before the film went on the production floor for digital restoration.
Naresh shares more, “The process is defined in terms of sequence of specific software modules to be used along with the level of parameters. Since the time available for restoration was scarce, we adopted various process in parallel. ”
According to Naresh, each movie is unique and brings its own challenges to restore it to its original level and he also asserts that the journey of restoring a film is painstaking by saying, “It is truly painstaking, where a whole team of technical experts works relentlessly for several weeks on each and every frame to remove even the minutest artifacts with unflagging resolve to bring back the dying film elements to its original state and intent. The end of the journey, however, is really joyful and satisfying when we see such old classic films come back to life.