Arri-news 2011

It’s a gradual process of printing, checking the color with the ARRICUBE, making slight changes, printing again and checking again. It might take four prints to get the color absolutely correct. AN: In general, how badly degraded was your print of the film? PS: Although our print was almost complete (we were only missing 13 intertitles, which were sourced from the Bundersarchiv in Germany), there was severe damage to it, especially at the beginning and end of each reel. There was a lot of dirt and dust, a lot of scratches, and many splices that had to be repaired. AN: Which of your ARRISCAN archive tools were used? PS: The first thing we did was to scan the whole film dry, through the Archive Gate. This was partly to record the state of the print for a ‘before-and-after’ restoration example we plan to screen after the end credits, and partly because we couldn’t be sure how the emulsion would react to the Wet Gate. After viewing the dry scan we realized how bad the damage was and decided to put the whole film through the Wet Gate. The scanning process was so delicate that in total it took three months. We didn’t really need to use our Sprocketless Transport on Mania , though I’m sure it will be used on other Nitrofilm projects. AN: Now that you’ve completed a major restoration, do you feel that the ARRI tools were the right ones to have invested in? PS: Absolutely. It was the right system to use and the quality is excellent; the one area we want to improve is the speed of Wet Gate scanning, so we’re very pleased to see the release of the Wet Gate dryer. This new tool will make Wet Gate scanning much faster, which is very important for large film archives that have a lot of historic film materials requiring attention. AN: When and where can the restored Mania be seen, and what is next for Nitrofilm? PS: Screenings are happening across Europe between September and November 2011. We start in Warsaw on September 4th and then move on to Paris, Madrid, London, Kiev and Berlin. Our next 4K restoration is Pan Tedeusz , based on the national epic of Poland. Watch the Mania trailer: www.arri.com/goto/1109/mania Visit the Nitrofilm website: www.nitrofilm.pl ARRI’s archive tools for the ARRISCAN allow fragile, historical films to be safely digitized and restored 10 ARRI NEWS