Journal of Film Preservation - FIAF

Double toning – a combination of tinting
in pink and iron toning in blue, with
decomposition: Eine Fahrt durch die Wachau,
1913.
69 Journal of Film Preservation / 85 / 2011
stencil-colour, there is actually no other way than doing
the whole process in colour, but with digital scans one
can see the various colours defined more clearly, and
one can even enhance each colour individually. If colour
decomposition forms certain characteristics, generating
another colour than the original, we prefer keeping
them as they are, to newly adding monotone colour.
Bridging between archival sources and digital
technology
When I was still in Japan, I ordered scanning work solely
from Haghefilm in Amsterdam, simply because they
had already at that time high expertise in scanning
problematic sources. Since these projects received quite
a lot of public attention, some domestic Japanese
laboratories were motivated to equip themselves to deal with such
problematic source elements. In the end, however, they regarded this
effort as so inefficient and risky that they decided to stay on the safer side:
to duplicate once analogue, and then scan. For me it was very regrettable
that this complex bridging between archival sources and digital technology
didn’t come into practice. And now, I’m the one who has to build the bridge.
The aim of our digital restoration is to preserve the original quality as
precisely as possible. For that purpose, scanning should start definitely
from sources which are the closest to the original, in order to make the best
use of the original information. In this way, accidents do happen, and one
cannot guarantee 100% safety of the source. Such a challenging attitude is
a sort of privilege of archival restoration done in-house, as with us, because
we are not only the operator, but are at the same time responsible for the
source material. If I were working in a commercial laboratory, I probably
wouldn’t dare to put our fragile nitrate onto the scanner either. Our sources
are sometimes extremely brittle, or the perforations are much smaller than
normal ones; in fact, I sometimes have to give up scanning when the wetgate
simply doesn’t let them run through. We are indeed testing the limits
of this digital equipment, from the analogue perspective.
In order to avoid damaging precious source material during scanning, we
take several preparatory steps. The source is first inspected carefully with
a KEM viewing table, and a sequence list with frame numbers is prepared,
so that each sequence can be calibrated according to its characteristics. If
the film is brittle, we let it stay for several days in a box with ethanol and
camphor, so that it gets softer and will run through the gate smoothly. Any
damage has to be repaired with tape, but the wet-gate doesn’t let a filmstrip
go through when it is too thick, so tape repair should be minimal. If
just the upper side of a perforation is damaged, as is often the case with
old prints due to physical stress during projection, we simply thread the
film from the end and scan it in reverse. Of course, this adds extra work,
necessitating the correction of the frame numbers and so on, but the effect
is tremendous, and definitely worthwhile.
Getting along with wet-gate
As wet-gate consists of a pair of glass plates, dust control is a very critical
point for users. It is advisable to separate the scanning room and the
monitoring room completely, since the liquid in the wet-gate is categorized