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Two Restorations in Seoul

The fragile medium of film has always been a great obstacle for archive historians and film makers and appears to be a serious challenge for the new technologies: how to preserve those nitrates on plastic in their present condition for their future audience to enjoy.

And yet, just like the waves in a stormy sea, one wave after another, a more challenging problem arises head on towards the film industry and that is how to restore pictures that are already damaged or destroyed.

Often films of irreplacable master pieces or classics with an artistic or historical value.

Film restoration has never been easy. It has always been difficult to store films, let alone repairing them. The prime reason of these difficulties comes from material problems. Film can be damaged for various reasons that go from mishandling to wrong storage conditions. I believe we can never really restore a film to its true glory. But with what present technology offers, I believe digital restoration is the most appropriate way to start off.

Efforts are being made on digital based film restoration in several countries but it is known only a few made relative progress. In Korea, we have a very efficient way of preserving our national history by means of establishing numbers of special archive libraries to house our rare and irreplacable history books. But unfortunately, in the field of motion pictures this is sadly not the case. This is due to our history of film making which is still relatively in its infancy and motion pictures were not considered as essential as books.

Between 1919 and 1994, Korea has made approximately 4,750 feature films but out of these, 188 feature films that were made before 1947 are now missing or have been destroyed.

A Prosecutor and the Lady Teacher is the only feature film that survived from the silent era in its most 'complete-form'. The film was directed by Yun, Dae-Ryong in the beginning of 1948 and was released to the public on June 5th 1948. This feature film lasts for 40 minutes and is the only silent film we have now in Korea. It all began when the Korean Film Archive (KFA) collected this film from a gentleman who was the original narrator of the film. He owned the origninal print of this movie which KFA tried later for the first time to restore by creating a dupe-negative to avoid further damages. Furthermore KFA had recorded the narrations with the same gentleman to keep the original features. Restoration of this film is a divided work of a seminar for the '100 Anniversary of Motion Picture history' which had been organised by Daily Cho-Sun and KFA in December 1995.

Themes of films made in that period are usually derived from the everyday lives of the ordinary people. This is not only considered as the best method to illustrate the way of life during that period but also to remind us our tradition and our historical philosophy. When I first saw this film, its extent of damage was worst that what I had expected and well beyond the possibilities we have at the moment in Korea to fully restore a film close to its original form. So I decided to save some part of this project for the furture.

To do this, I first had to keep this damaged film in its present condition. Therefore I planned to scan the whole film with digital technology and keep every frame on a data-base. By doing so I could pertain on what was left of this film's present condition and experience with different restoration method or wait for future development of advanced technology in film restoration.

Since the film was heavily damaged with dust, scratches, torn and displaced, my main concern was to maintain the film at its present condition and find out the best method to remove the dust and scratches and stabilise the film. I left the 'other' problems to be dealt with later on. Obviously the working process for film restoration was first to scan the film then to do a digital restoration. Film recording was the best way to achieve the desired result for my job. But it was very tedious and intensive work, and the budget for this project had placed a financial burden on the archive and prevented me to use full colour range 10bit film to film reconstruction methods and pursue a different means which is the best known method so far. Therefore, as a trial test, I had to transfer the film into Quantel's Henry, retouch it and then record it back to film via the Kodak Cineon. Fortunately I had found out a few houses which could achieve that and make video to film transfer effectively. So I made digital video transfer with the given film. I was quite confident about the quality of film transfer using D-I based video images from my previous job experience done for cinemas commercials. And also keeping the image in D-1 tape is the good archive method to store image in a data-based environment.

Once the image had been recorded into video it was not possible to have a better resolution even though we could use digital technology. Nevertheless, resolution free video technology is now under experimental stage by a number of scientists and computer engineers. These efforts could make it possible to obtain better quality films from video images.

This is the first film restoration attempt in Korea, done under the responsibility of the Korean Film Archive with the partnership of the Light in Motion Post Production company. Since we are still exploring this field and Korea is still in a trial stage, we have to allow the sacrifice of resolution and go for the techniques and knowhows of full restoration. And we are anticipating more advanced technology currently developing in Korea to help us with this project, such as automatic dust and scratch detection and removal. And I am pleased to announce that some image processing experts begin to join our work for finding out better and more effective methods. A trial to create a PC-based film restoration software is already started by computer graphics engineers, image processing experts, artists and films restorers. I hope all these of efforts will enable us to use Pcs to restore damaged film in a near future.

But until the new technology catches up, we will just have to rely on frame by frame retouching.

Bae, Jong-Keang