It was an invigorating experience to work on the re-mastering of Groundhog Day with colorist John Dunn at Sony’s Stage 6 Colorworks facility. We were seated at the Baselight at a screen height distance of less than 2x; the clarity and detail from the scanned negative at 4K was staggering. The process of re-mastering this much beloved film was a revelation. John and I were able to extract incredible detail, retiming shots with subtle color and density controls, as well as selecting multiple power windows—generating a level of scene to scene consistency that had not been possible with the limited controls of the photochemical era. Consistency in this film is especially important because of the oft-repeated scenes shot on successive production days in changing light. The richly dense and fine grain Kodak negative clearly contained even more than the 4K data scanned. After an initial runthrough, I asked John to exploit his full digital “toolbox” in his first pass at re-mastering. “This is no sacred cow,” I said.
What does this suggest about a decade of DIs that have been rendered at 2K resolution—and of the filmout negatives struck from those files? Sony is rescanning and remastering many popular titles in their catalog, movies that initially had been exhibited from 2K digital intermediate files, as film prints or as DCPs—but now rescanning from the original camera negatives at 4K resolution. This remastering of the OCN may be viable for films that have been successful enough to warrant such added expense, but what about those films that have not made the cut, films, for the moment at least, shelved because of an indifferent box office— and waiting for a possible redemptive rlate inclusion in the critical canon or as a cult favorite? Citizen Kane was largely forgotten for several decades. Monte Hellman’s Two Lane Blacktop, a film roundly pilloried on its initial release in 1971, recently received a glorious 2 DVD and Blu-Ray release by the Criterion Collection and has just been included in the 2012 National Film Registry.
Unless rescanned, movies mastered with a 2K DI, and a 2K filmout negative, are married to that resolution, even allowing for the evolving technology of uprezing. Will many of us just have to accept that the past decade of our work will be trapped in a rapidly obsolescent 2K format? What more apparent “watermark” of an era of filmmaking can you imagine than a generation of movies marked as substandard?
