Restoring Dr. Strangelove (cont'd)

Somewhat emulating the digital intermediate workflow, the selected film was prepared for scanning and processing. Cineric used a specially adapted Oxberry film scanner to convert the various elements into data files in 10-bit log DPX, and Dan DeVincent, the lab’s Director of Digital Restoration, created look-up tables (LUTs) designed to optimize the scanner for each element and achieve the dynamic range of 35mm film. A LUT could be applied on the scanner, for example, to bring a shot from the print much closer to the fine-grain, and bridge it even further using density and contrast correction.

Cineric engineers also developed a wet-gate scanning technique that eliminated many flaws. Although most of the flaws in the surviving film elements were manually removed, Da Vinci’s Revival– automated image-restoration software–was also used to find and fix other imperfections. During later passes, the Cineric team corrected other anomalies such as flicker and unsteadiness, and density fluctuations were addressed in a final color-correction pass. At each phase of the restoration there was careful examination of the results to check for introduced artifacts or for anomalies that may have been left in the image.