Cinema Arts recently relied on a Blackmagic Design Cintel Film Scanner to restore more than 20 Mexican film classics for distribution on Spanish-speaking channels Cine Nostalgia and Cine Estelar.
Cine Nostalgia and Cine Estelar feature a number of movie genres, including comedy, classic western, drama and action from the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, streamed in HD over cable platforms DirecTV, AT&T, Verizon, Cox and Frontier, as well as America TV and Canal 41 Miami. Cinema Arts, which is located in Mexico, was tasked with bringing the channel’s large volume of Mexican 35mm film classics to digital HD.
“It’s not just about restoring a film,” said Carlos Vasallo, CEO of Cinema Arts. “Our goal is to present the highest quality and be faithful to its artistic and historical work as envisioned by the original producers, directors and screenwriters.”
Over the last three years, Cinema Arts has restored 1,000 of the 2,000 films stored in the Cine Nostalgia and Cine Estelar vault, from 35mm to full HD, with a goal to complete the HD migration before the end of 2016 with help from the Cintel Film Scanner. Cinema Arts invested in the Cintel Film Scanner, one of the first owned in Mexico, to meet the accelerated timeline.
“With Thunderbolt support and seamless integration with DaVinci Resolve Studio, the Cintel Film Scanner offers a much faster film restoration workflow than comparable products,” said Vasallo. “Within the first few weeks of owning the system, we were able to successfully restore more than 20 movies. That’s more than twice the speed with which we had been restoring the previous films. Once we add the Cintel’s 16mm and audio gates, our results will be even better, exponentially speeding up the project to make our goal.”
First, staff physically remove the film’s visible damage, then use Cintel, connected to a Mac desktop system via Thunderbolt, to scan the film in real time. Cintel’s extensive calibration capabilities let staff tweak digital elements to output a DPX file that is equivalent to the original film quality.
“The Cintel calibration tools take into account the photo and color quality of the original film, and thus we have been able to correct 70% to 80% of the film defects due to wear and tear,” Vasallo explained. “Once the scanning has been registered according to the parameters set up by the production and post teams, files are downloaded and digitized to a DPX extension to begin the color grading part of the workflow using DaVinci Resolve Studio. No re-uploading or transferring needed.”
Cinema Arts’ film restoration project features Mexican favorites, including films from the Golden Age of Mexican cinema, with actors like Andrés García, Jorge Rivero, Sasha Montenegro and Maribel Guardia.
