DVDs and the Preservation of Classic Films
Preserving our Film Heritage in Digital Format
Nov 20, 2008
In today’s media-oriented society, DVD editions of Casablanca and Gone with the Wind are as obligatory to a collector's library as classic books by authors like Hemingway or Steinbeck.
However, not many consumers are aware of the difficulties that surround the release of a good DVD edition of a classic Hollywood film produced from the 1930s through the 1970s.
The DVD Boom
The costs involved on a DVD edition are impressive, and the commercial viability of any film is inevitably an important factor to consider.
Although the quality of DVD editions of classic Hollywood movies has improved since the format appeared a decade ago, the huge number of films that deserve to be restored and distributed makes it difficult to satisfy the demands of consumers.
However many technological advances have been made in the last seven or eight years that allow production companies to increase their production schedule and make available to film buffs and historians new classic titles that were sometimes almost forgotten in their rich film libraries.
Production of DVD extra features has also improved enormously in recent years. Today, it’s not only the 100 mega classic’s that get the special edition treatment but also hundreds of other minor classics.
Movies like Lost Horizon (1936), The Caine Mutiny (1954), El Cid (1961) and The Fall of the Roman Empire (1964) were meticulously restored and benefited from a Special Edition release that helped revive interest in these somewhat forgotten films with insightful documentaries that made them precious items in any collectors film library.
Film Restoration
The greatest challenge producers have to face when releasing a classic film is the image quality of the DVD edition.
With the proliferation of Plasma and LCD televisions, coupled with multi channel sound systems, the viewing experience was greatly enhanced achiving an unparalleled quality.
To be able to provide a rewarding viewing experience in the high tech home cinema equipment of our days, some movie companies have invested in digital software technology that helps to clean up and restore colour and brilliance to decade old movies.
Although digital restoration is a very important, the restoration of a movie starts long before the digital treatment process with the photochemical restoration of the original negative.
Since film is an organic material, it changes with time due to heat, cold and dust and as a consequence the original negatives of many classic films have faded badly and sometimes deteriorated to such condition that only highly specialized teams of professionals can rescue them from oblivion.
These expensive restorations are also very time consuming. For the restoration of the 1958 Hitchcock classic Vertigo, James C. Katz and Robert A. Harris spent more than a year and a budget of one million dollars.
To assure that a classic film not only will look good in a new DVD edition but also will be preserved for future generations it’s fundamental that Governments and movie studios invest huge amounts of money into film preservation programs that will guaranty the survival of our visual memory for generations to come.
