Welcome to season 3! To kick things off, we’ve brought Duplitech Film Services Manager Blake Blasingame in to discuss film preservation and mastering for home video. Are you ready for 88 minutes of unadulterated shop talk about grain structure, bit depth, oversampling, color grading, and vinegar syndrome? Of course you are! This is Film Formally, after all.
In this episode, we discuss:
The process of preserving and restoring films for Blu-Ray and DVD releases.
Scan resolutions - 4k, and the value of oversampling.
Vinegar syndrome: the silent killer.
How film elements are sourced for scans - negatives, IPs, IBs, and release prints.
Robert Richardson and revisionism.
William Peter Blatty and the restoration of the lost Legion cut of The Exorcist III
More audio restoration!
If you’d like to support the show, here’s a link to our Patreon.
Additional Resources:
Works discussed during this episode:
Snow Falling on Cedars
The Exorcist III / Legion
The Thing
The French Connection
The Big Lebowski
Blade Runner 2049
Mad Max: Fury Road
The Heartbreak Kid
The works of Wong Kar-Wai
Media:
Suspiciously similar restoration colour grades:
Further reading on the Ritrovata and Eclair grading controversy can be seen here.
Blake Blasingame is Film Services Manager at Duplitech, a media service lab based out of Torrance, California. He supervises the mastering workflow for multiple home video labels, with a primary concentration in digitizing and restoring catalog titles. An alumnus of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts ( B.F.A., Film & Television 2010 ), Blake is passionate in his efforts to preserve motion picture film. He is also an independent filmmaker with a couple of shorts and a feature ( Cry Murder, 2012 ) under his belt.