Film scanners equipped with infrared (IR) illumination and Kodak’s Digital ICE software can automatically detect and correct scratches and dust so they are invisible to even the most critical viewers. The Kodak Digital Ice software operates by analyzing the familiar red, green, and blue channels along with the extra IR channel to provide an accurate per-pixel defect matte.  The defect matte is used to identify which pixels to adjust so that scratched pixels can be restored nearly to their original values.

The power of the Kodak Digital ICE algorithm is most easily demonstrated with some examples. Figure 1 shows a “before” and “after” pair of images.  These samples, from color negative film, were intentionally scratched to simulate the effects of improperly handled color negative film rolls.  The images below have had their color and contrast adjusted for display on computer screens; hence, defects appear lighter in the images.  It can be seen in the “after” image on the right that the scratches are virtually gone and that all image details have been preserved.

Figure 1: A scan of a 5218 film frame showing (a) scan without using Digital ICE processing, and (b) scan with Digital ICE processing.

Figure 2 shows another “before” and “after” pair of images.  Clearly, Digital ICE has corrected a significant amount of light loss caused by scratches and dust on the film.  As before, these films were intentionally scratched and allowed to accumulate dirt and dust for testing purposes.

Figure 2: A scan of a film frame showing (a) scan without using Digital ICE processing, and (b) scan with Digital ICE processing.

Many of the real images encountered in the restoration of older films have less obvious defects.  In fact, some images appear to have no defects at all when the movie is stopped.  But when the movie or video is playing, the scratches and dust become more visible.  Figure 3 shows an original frame of film on the left and the defect matte on the right revealing the dust and scratches detected by Digital ICE.  Digital ICE automatically corrects these seemingly “invisible” defects, resulting in far superior image quality.

Figure 3: A scanned film frame showing (a) scan without using Digital ICE processing, and (b) the defects detected by Digital ICE processing.

Summary: Scratches and dust have never been easier and faster to find and fix when you scan your film with a scanner using Kodak’s Digital ICE software.  The combination of infrared illumination and high-speed image processing offer a powerful tool for traditional “dustbusting” applications as well as for more intensive film restoration projects.

Aleksander Bach is an award-winning commercial director based in Cologne, Germany. The son of a photographer, Bach was born in Poland and moved to Germany with his parents as a boy. He studied audio/video engineering and piano at the Institute for Music and Media in Düsseldorf, and completed his education in the graduate program at the Filmakademie Baden-Württemberg. Bach has won two consecutive Young Director Awards at the Cannes Lions International Advertising Festival, in 2008 and 2009, and a Gold Award at the 2009 New York Festival. The 2009 winner at Cannes was a black-and-white documentary-style spot for the Red Cross titled “Stars,” which was photographed by Peter Matjasko on 35 mm film. Bach’s resume also includes inventive music videos and a music documentary. Here, he opines about the state of international commercial filmmaking:

A lot is changing in European commercial production. That’s partly due to the worldwide economic crisis, but the underlying structure of how the business works is also completely changing. In the classic model, a director in the commercial industry is represented by a production company. Lately, I have clients and agencies contacting me directly. They call and ask whether I am interested in writing a story. If I say yes, they brief me about the commercial. The lines of communication are getting shorter, because it’s more efficient. That’s necessary since at the moment, budgets are shrinking. For me as a director, that’s great. I have the chance not only to direct my interpretation of a storyboard, but sometimes I’m also able to write the spots myself, either with the agency or directly with the client.

Stars for the International Red Cross

The problem with most projects is the script. Agencies and clients create the ideas without consulting the filmmakers, or they bring them in too late. If directors are involved much earlier in the process, there’s a good chance the films will be better. At the moment I have a project where a client contacted me directly and asked if I was interested. The commercial machine can be so big, and then we all have to feed the machine. Right now, people are looking for ways to speed communication.

My sense is that people want to have real stories again. There is so much advertising on television, and people are tired of that. There is more competition from the Internet. Agencies and clients are trying to understand how to make a positive contact with their customers. Everyone loves watching a good film, and a good commercial. It doesn’t matter whether it’s 30 or 60 seconds long. If it’s a good film, and a good idea, people will watch it and talk about it. Quality is what is needed.

Stars for the International Red Cross

The main challenges in choosing a project are finding the right scripts, and having the time to develop them. I am learning what makes a script good, and how to make a script better. I have to find out from the agency how much space I have. Do I have to shoot the script exactly how it is right now, or do they want my point of view? In choosing projects, I have to keep in mind that if I want to be successful in the future, I have to shoot good stuff. That is why, if it’s a great script, I will fight to shoot it. The second thing is to have good partner – a producer who understands my vision and my style of shooting.

If I am shooting something like the Red Cross “Stars” spot, which is a very visual commercial, I will always choose film. Analog images are still completely different to me. It’s another world. If you want to create something artful, with high quality, you can do it more quickly with film. You can make other formats look close to 35 mm film, but it’s still not the same. It’s not just a question of resolution. It’s just different.

Stars for the International Red Cross

My strongest partner is Peter Matjasko. He was director of photography on the Red Cross spot, the Orange spot, and the Mercedes Benz spec spot that you can see on my website (www.aleksanderbach.com). I continue to work with him because to this day I haven’t found a better director of photography. For me, a good cinematographer is not someone who is merely able to create a beautiful picture, but who also understands my vision and is able to translate it into the world of telling stories with pictures. This is the most important thing. It’s very important that I listen to Peter and what he is saying, as a person. I don’t believe that in filmmaking I know everything. I have to steer (direct) my team and make the decision at the end. The director of photography is the master of pictures. I explain my idea, and Peter might translate it in his way because of something he sees. He is a very strong storyteller and my right hand in telling the story. I am working with the actors, and he is working with the camera, and if it comes together, we can make the best product at the end of the day.

I really love commercial work because of the short way of working. In a very short time, you can get a very creative output. The Red Cross and Orange commercials were 90 seconds, which is quite long for commercials, but I feel that I would like to have more space for drama. So, in the long term, my goal is to create a feature film in the next years. Even though I love the short format, I also want to tell longer stories. I think that will be the next step for me. In features, sometimes you spend two or even three years on one project. I think I have to take the next step into longer, more narrative ways of storytelling.

Aleksander's spot "Stars" is featured in Kodak Motion Picture's Commercials eBrochure. Click here and navigate to the "Inspiration" tab to see it and other great commercials.

Whether the production in question uses hard drives, CD’s , tapes or DVDs to store their content, there is always the very real probability that a hard drive will crash, that a tape will get scratched, that the format used will be obsolete and render the information unreadable in a few years (even if the information is still intact). What good does it do to have perfectly good information that you cannot access?

Film is a very mature technology compared to “digital.” We have had a long time to learn and apply those learnings along the way in order to make products that best meet our customers’ needs. Many years of research have gone into understanding and optimizing film formulations to ensure its archival properties. Motion picture film, if properly processed and kept under recommended conditions can last for several hundred years, no other currently used storage media comes anywhere close to that.  In addition, the “filing” system is very simple and does not require much maintenance. Entire productions can be stored away for many years until someone decides it is time for a re-release or a special “coming out of the vault” edition. 

One key feature of film has always been the long term stability and usefulness of the images. Three factors that make this possible are: 1) the stability of the image itself; 2) the stability of the base/support; and 3) the means to extract the image/information.

For well processed B&W films, the image is actually made up of metallic silver, which is VERY stable... providing Arrhenius predictions in terms of centuries.  Color films use organic dyes for their images. Improvements in the dyes themselves and in the methods to incorporate these dyes into the films, have yielded large improvements in the stability of these images.  Although not as stable as metallic silver, these new dyes can provide stability of many decades based on Arrhenius predictions. 

The use of polyester for the film base provides a very stable material for the images. This has greatly extended the stability of films.  Finally, since film images are optical (meaning what you see is what you get) it is VERY easy to see and extract the image... no complicated electronic format (that usually becomes obsolete) is needed.

For productions that originate digitally the amount of data that is generated is very large (much like me taking 15 still pictures of my daughter with my digital camera, whereas in the past I would probably have taken 2 with my film camera). The volume of data only helps compound the dilemma that follows once the production is finished and now content decisions have to be made as to what will be kept and what will not. If the ultimate intention truly is to preserve the content, then this content will likely be transferred back to film and be tucked away safely in a refrigerated vault until needed again. If the production was originated on film and the entire flow went through a traditional optical film process it is significantly easier to archive all the elements.

Furthermore, according to “The Digital Dilemma” report released back in 2007 by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, it costs almost 12 times more to store the digital master of a movie than it costs to keep a conventional film master. If, as mentioned before the production was originated digitally the cost of preservation becomes significantly higher especially when compared to the low cost of storing several reels of film and sound negatives from an all film production.

Not only is film the highest quality media, with the longest life expectancy and guaranteed access, in the long run, it is also the most inexpensive. So you tell me, why would you NOT choose film as your archival media?

When I started college, I had an aunt who asked: “What are you going to study?” I said, “Television”. And she said, “That’s wonderful! Television repairmen make so much money. I just had a tube changed last week.” And, then a few years later I got involved with media asset preservation, and my aunt asked: “What is that?” I said, “It’s preservation.” And she said, “Oh, that’s much better. Funeral directors make more money than television repairmen.” She never quite caught on.

But I have always been a movie fan, and the great director Sidney Pollock, who recently passed away, once said something I printed out and actually carry around with me.  He said:  “Films are part of our cultural history. They help us locate ourselves in time and give us a sense of the geography in our lives. We need them in order to point us accurately in the future.  Like all accurate representations of who and what we were, they deserve preservation in their authentic form.”  I just think that really sums up the whole purpose of preservation.

Film is a medium that captures nuances – which makes it a fragile medium; that’s why we have to handle it carefully, protect it, store it under the proper environmental conditions. But until someone can come up with a better system – one that has a guaranteed access and with a ‘life’ equal to, or better than, film and offers other advantages -- the analog film system is the best we have.  Someday there may be a better system. It’s not here today and until it is, film, in my mind, will not be replaced.

People talk about costs, as in “film is so much more expensive…” because you obviously have to pay for every frame and you have to pay for processing, but the question is:  What happens after that?  What we’re making today has to be available for more than today or next week, or next year. It’s gotta be something that the future generations can have access to.  If they can’t access the work, then all of the effort was wasted, regardless of what it cost.  And with digital, ‘access’ is the missing ingredient because there’s no standardization in the field.

No one had ever analyzed the cost of storing a 4K digital master – all the material you would need to make up that master – compared to analog film.  And so the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences did that analysis because   they felt it was necessary for the industry to understand exactly what they were getting into as they went into digital.  They found it was twelve to sixteen times more expensive to store the information on digital media than it was to store it on film. 

And that’s a conservative number.  With film, it’s cheap to save everything, to put it in boxes in storage under environmental conditions. You can’t do that with digital.

We put that analysis in ‘The Digital Dilemma’, a publication that the Science and Technology Council of the Academy did as a result of as summit they had where they brought together all the archivists and chief technology officers of all the studios and other organizations, including the Library of Congress, UCLA, and so forth, to identify potential problems and solutions with the onslaught of digital.  And every one of them said the same thing: “We don’t know how long we’ll be able to access the material, and we haven’t been able to get people to understand the problem.”

So the Academy, which is not an advocacy organization, hired consultants and sent them out to other industries that had similar problems over the years, to try to get some answers.  And they found the others did have similar problems, but no answers, no solution.  And, in my view, the only way we will get a solution is to do a complete ‘needs analysis’ of what is required to store and access digital information and present it to vendors as a business opportunity – not just for the motion picture industry, but also for science, government, other industries, and so forth.  It’s a huge problem and a huge opportunity.

But meanwhile, I, for one, don’t want to be in a position of having to verbally describe – for future generations -- the ‘noir’ of Casablanca. Or the shear scope of The Sound of Music or Lawrence of Arabia.  Those are magnificent images, captured by motion picture film. You can’t describe those verbally. We can’t afford to lose them. That’s why they’re being preserved on film.  That’s why I’m a preservationist.

During the next few years Ted Turner proceeded to show the industry what could be done with their library and the literal gold mine that was before them in a fledgling consumer market. By 1990 with Ted’s cable network booming and home video sales growing the other studios were now starting to assess their own libraries in order to emulate what Turner Entertainment was accomplishing.

The studios were now starting to pour millions of dollars into these film libraries forming a boutique industry for the restoration and preservation of motion picture titles. Small film laboratories starting springing up, primarily in the Hollywood area, with expertise in the restoration of film. Studios were not only restoring the titles in their libraries, but new preservation strategies was put in place calling for proper storage standards to insure their investment in restoration of older titles and new production titles would be secure for long term keeping.

In 1991 the ANSI IT9.11 was introduced to the moving image film libraries and archives calling for lower temperatures and humidity. Paramount and Warner Bros. studios immediately built new state-of-the-art film preservation archives with storage temperatures and RH standards meeting the new ANSI criteria.
In that same year Kodak set their EI Business Planning unit into action looking at the state of film preservation through out North America doing a comprehensive report on the storage environments within the film libraries and archives. The results of that report came back with a statement that said much of what was being stored is in jeopardy and certainly there was opportunity for a new service business to be developed.

In 1992 the approval for building what would become the state-of-the-art motion picture film preservation facility PRO-TEK was given and in March of 1994 PRO-TEK opened its doors on the second floor of the Kodak Distribution building on the Kodak campus in Hollywood.

By the mid-1990’s studios were well on their way to restoring the films of years past and insuring there was a preservation strategy in place for new films being produced. These same libraries took on even more importance with the DVD boom soon to be encountered when revenues from library DVD sales at times eclipsing new production revenues.

As Y2K rolled in so did the unveiling of a new Kodak service call Digital Intermediate at its Los Angeles visual effects facility Cinesite. Little did we know that this new way of approaching post production would have a dramatic impact on the preservation standards and practices established during the previous 10 years.

Since this first digital intermediate on the production title “Oh Brother, Where Art Thou” in 2000, over 90% of all feature production titles shot on film are scanned into data for daily viewing, editing and post production completion today. Feature deliverables range from a Digital Intermediate Original (DIO) to a Linear Tape Optical (LTO) tape. All consumer markets are satisfied coming from the digital source master stored on an LTO tape and down converted. Most TV shows today are captured digitally, posted digitally and finished on High Definition SR (HDSR) tape. Those still captured on film are posted in digital with a digital deliverable.

Why the impact on the preservation strategies established in the 1990’s? There are many issues to discuss such as resolution, file formats, media types etc. But, simply said, digital is not archival. As technology advances and Moore’s Law dictates a change in hardware, software and media every 18 months and with the studios receiving petabytes of information on both features and TV production on various media types and file formats, it’s an over whelming issue.

A perfect example of this is the LTO tape that features are delivered on. Currently we’re at LTO 4 with 5 coming up within a few months. LTO tapes are only compatible back two (2) generations. What does this mean to the studio, migrating tapes every 4-5 years.

The studio’s have protected themselves on the feature side by recording out the final cut with all color timing, effects and titles onto film. Not only recording out the DIO but also recording out B&W separation masters which will last for 100’s of years in preservation storage. These separation used in the future can be scanned back into data for later use when (not if!) the date file becomes obsolete.

But this leaves TV programming, independent features and many other types of programming that will be lost due to obsolescence or discretionary decision making by the content holder who does not or will not spend the money required for constant migration to the next contemporary format.

Two weeks ago I held a day long symposia on the subject of Digital Asset Management (DAM) inviting all of the major studios for a day long discussion on digital assets and how will they be preserved for long term keeping. It was a sobering day with all studios being represented to understand that much of what we had established to protect our moving image assets has been undone by a new technology where the answers for long term keeping remain elusive.

We are nine years into the DI era, feature titles shot as little as five years ago are being rescanned to meet today’s higher criteria for consumer markets. Thankfully for feature work we have film to go back to, but TV and other markets are not as fortunate. Some studios are looking at taking their HD masters and recording back to a DI for preservation, but this will be a discretionary decision process. Some programming will be lost.

There is much work ahead to get us back to the solid strategies of working with an archival media such as film, everyone has hope that there is an answer for digital preservation, but how soon is the question.

Let’s start with 65mm color negative. The big, recent example of 65mm use is on The Dark Knight. It’s not an entirely 65mm production. The 65mm was cut into a number of 35mm shots, like the Bank Heist and the Batmobile chase scenes. 65mm was chosen to do this because it simplyis the best. In the opening sequences of The Dark Knight you can just see the quality that 65mm brings to the screen.

In fact, a digital intermediate wasn’t done on The Dark Knight because of the desire to retain all the film detail. Now, of course, all of the special effects had to be created in the digital space, but fundamentally they went through a traditional film finish on this movie.

There was a session at IMAX a little while ago at which key industry people spoke. One point which was made was that one of the things large format does is to keep the quality bar extremely high so that digital has to continue to improve.

But while 65mm is the gold standard, its use is more the exception than the rule. 35mm 4-perf is really still the standard by which everybody judges film’s quality and attributes. It’s still the predominant format for high end feature production, but 3-perf usage has grown significantly and there are plenty of 3-perf movements for cameras now available.

Actually, 3-perf has been around for ages. But today, the main catalyst for the increase in usage is the popularity of digital intermediate. Without a DI, getting from a 3-perf negative to a 4-perf print through a traditional film process is difficult.

Beyond that, Super 16 is also a well-established format. It still gives the look of film, but for a lower budget. And now the improvements in the film stocks – first with VISION2 and now with VISION3 technology – have made this format even more viable. Probably the best recent example of a Super 16 production is The Wrestler: Oscar-nominated, mainstream, very popular and successful.

Mostly, people choose Super 16 because of cost, but some shoot elements of movies on 16 for creative reasons. If, for example, the filmmaker wants more grain in particular scenes, shooting Super 16 is one way of achieving that.

And then the other format being used today is 2-perf 35mm. Again, that’s a cost decision, but it does let filmmakers maintain the cache of shooting on 35mm. They can use standard 35mm cameras and everything that goes with them (e.g. the lens selection). And the image size of the 2-perf can be over 60% larger than that of Super 16

Just like 3-perf, 2-perf is not really new either. Clint Eastwood’s early Spaghetti Westerns were shot on it – but it hasn’t been a practical decision until recently. Michael Goi, current president of the ASC, has just shot a movie on 2-perf. It’s called The Christmas Movie, and will be released this November.

And again, if someone is shooting 2-perf, they will have to do a scan-and-record. They can do a very simple DI: but they have to do one if they want to output to a 4-perf print. Today, probably 75%-80% of films go through the DI process anyway.

Finally – there’s Super 8. I would love to see a properly shot Super 8 VISION3 movie transferred on a Spirit (you can get a Super 8 gate for the Spirit), made into a DI and then output to a 35mm print. I’ll bet it wouldn’t look bad. And, you know, that would address one of the issues that gets raised by our customers every now and then: “Kodak makes films better and better with less and less grain, but sometimes we want grain, and you don’t give us many options to get it.” 2-perf 35mm does give some grain, and so does 16mm, but it’s not much more grain. Shooting on Super 8 would do that.

At the moment, one hour dramas on US TV are still very much 3-perf 35mm. Castle; Grey’s Anatomy; Private Practice; Desperate Housewives; Brothers & Sisters; Lost; The Mentalist; Fringe; Mad Men; and Two and a Half Men are all returning shows shot on 3-perf 35mm. HBO is shooting loads of 35mm 3-perf at the moment. New series shot on the same format include: ; Hung; Boardwalk Empire; How to Make it in America; Wonderful Maladies; Treme; and others.

Super 16 usage has also grown. There are a bunch of shows like Heartland; Scrubs; Chuck; One Tree Hill; Lincoln Heights; Greek; Crash and others shooting S16. Two new ABC programs – Eastwick and Middle – also chose to use Super 16 their first season. It’s an option that people find delivers great value and quality – especially for this medium.

The one that surprises most people is America’s National Football League (NFL) and their continued use of Super 16. All NFL games are still captured on 16mm film. What everyone sees on game day and on sports newscasts is HD broadcast, but NFL Films also shoots and archives all the games in S16 for special features, tributes and highlight shows.

In Europe, TV programs that use film are primarily shot on Super 16 – and there is some European interest right now in moving up to 2-perf 35mm. At present, there are actually quite a few French TV shows shooting 2-perf.

We are also seeing TV shows around the world that use both film and digital for different creative purposes. Some of the CSI spin-off shows (not the original: that’s still on film) are shooting digital, but are also buying reasonable amounts of film because they’ve got second-unit cameras shooting film. The television series “Cold Case,” is using film to capture their flashbacks, and digital for the current day scenes.

So, we have a bunch of shows on film, but when it comes to digital, the pressures are all to do with cost. Nobody is saying, “We want to shoot digital because of quality.” It’s all because of cost. Digital is accepted as a medium that can work in certain circumstances. It has improved considerably, but it’s still not as good as film

We could talk about 65mm film as the ‘gold standard of quality’ (just ask Christopher Nolan whose cinematographer Wally Pfister ASC shot parts of ‘The Dark Knight’ and the upcoming ‘Inception’ on 65mm) – the use of Super 16 for TV origination in Europe and its growing use in the US -- or the unique look possible from Super 8 footage cut into a finished theatrical print. But for this discussion, let’s just look at 35mm film.

If only because 35mm is so well understood. Or is it?

Talk about 35mm film and most filmmakers assume you are talking about 4-perf – and for good reason; it’s the widely-accepted quality standard and still a viable and cost effective option for productions around the world. But with Kodak improvements in emulsion technology, the introduction of new cameras with 2-perf and 3-perf capability, and the increased use of digital intermediates (DI’s), there are more options than ever before. And when the challenge is cost, they’re more affordable.

Consider…for equal run-times, filmmakers shooting 3-perf 35 need 25-percent less stock than they need to shoot 4-perf, which means their film processing costs are also 25-percent less. And, for those shooting 2-perf, their costs for film stock and for processing are 50-percent less than shooting 4-perf. The telecine and finishing costs are the same for all 35m formats because those are based on run times and in this example, run times are equal.

Of course, 2-perf, 3-perf, and 4-perf are just different 35mm formats, so they are all exposed onto normal 35mm motion picture film stock. There are a number of cameras available with that capability, but the run time per magazine is different. 4-perf runs at 90 feet per minute; 3-perf at 67.5 feet per minute, and 2-perf at 45 feet per minute. So, a 400-foot magazine can run from about 4.4 minutes to 5.9 minutes to 8.8 minutes – depending on the format chosen.

And what about image quality? If you agree the bigger the image area the better the quality, consider:

• for widescreen (2.40 aspect ratio) movie production, a 2-perf 35mm image is 3 times larger than Super 16mm; a 3-perf 35mm image is 1.3 times larger than a 2-perf image and 3.9 times larger than a Super 16 image.
• for HDTV (1.78) origination, a 2-perf 35mm image is 1.6 times larger than a Super 16 image; a 3-perf 35mm image is 2.4 times larger than a 2-perf image; and a 3-perf image is 3.9 times larger than one shot on Super 16.

(Panavision / 2perf Explained – www.panvison.com)

And one more point of quality: a 2-perf image shot on the most recent film technology, KODAK VISION3 500T 5219, will show less grain than a 4-perf image captured on the KODAK VISION 500T 5279 stock just recently discontinued. That more than makes up for the magnification required in going from 4-perf to 2-perf for these two film systems and is a tribute to the continued advancements in film emulsion technology.

And further image structure improvements on 2-perf and 3-perf are possible with the use of improved motion-compensated adaptive sharpening and noise-reduction algorithms used in the digital intermediate process, so those smaller images can look great on television and cinema screens.

Plus, those formats bring with them all the advantages that come with shooting on 35mm film – its emotional power, range of stocks, full lens selection, archivability, universal acceptance, and unique film look.

We would be remiss if our discussion about formats didn’t mention 4perf traditional photo chemical finish, a post option that remains a cost effective high quality path for completing a film project. Photo chemical post production has limitations; for example you can’t selectively paint a blue shirt red or brown eyes green. However, despite the current emphasis on digital post production, traditional 35mm 4perf photo chemical finish is still a viable and cost effective way to produce a film.

For many35mm film remains the ideal capture medium today -- across a broad array of available formats -- from wide screen anamorphic projected in a movie theater to 16:9 HD displayed in your living room. And while 4-perf is still considered the ‘gold standard’ of 35mm, 3-perf and 2-perf offer affordable options while maintaining the cache, the flexibility and uniqueness of 35mm. Plus, there's always Super 16, which provides theatrical and high-definition images at a very attractive price.

The point is – it’s not only advantageous to shoot on film, it may be more affordable than some might think. For filmmakers unwilling to compromise with another medium, but willing to consider the multiple formats 35mm film offers, film offers lots of creative choices -- beyond the obvious.

Multiple assignments within Kodak’s Motion Picture Division, spanning Coating Engineering, Formulation Engineer, and Systems Engineer of Motion Picture films.

More recent activities have included the design and formulation of the Vision film portfolio and the systems integration of the VISION2 and VISION3 film portfolios.

BS Degree in Chemical Engineering (Howard University, 1991)

Joined Eastman Kodak in 1991.

Mitnick: Lost is a commercial for Apple iTunes. It documents a frustrating and universal experience: a cell phone has gone missing. The spot's humor hinges on the method by which we've learned to locate missing electronics: call it and it will beep. The look for the spot was inspired by the desolate, quiet beauty of the Catskill Mountains in the midst of winter where most of the action plays out in a single wide shot. There's irony in staging this amidst such a blank landscape.

Livingston Johnson: In the Slim Jim's spot Champs, a young man and woman are sitting idly on a couch when suddenly the man opens his mouth and unleashes a primal roar: a Slim Jim is flying through the air, and he intends to catch it. In one deft motion he snatches it in his teeth and returns to his position on the couch like a proud dog, all to the girl's amazement. We wanted Champs to look like a moving painting, so we positioned the actors on a 17th-century, European-style couch as if they were having their portraits taken. In contrast, the costumes are modern and informal, which speaks to the playfulness of the Slim Jim brand.

Mitnick: The AICP Show and the Kodak recognition afforded us a ton of industry exposure for our large and diverse body of work. Nat and I recently signed with Station Film for worldwide commercial representation. We are so excited to be working with Station's Stephen Orent and Michael Di Girolamo, alongside talent that includes fellow 2009 AICP honorees Harold Einstein and Emmanuel Lubezki (ASC). Hopefully we'll return to next year's AICP Show with something new.

Livingston Johnson: There is a definite sense of relief to be validated by the mainstream elite. My first thought was, 'OK, what I'm doing is relevant, and I can keep making things that I like and they will appeal to the masses.'

Mitnick: We are currently in heavy preproduction on a new short film entitled The Kook. It is a thriller in the style of Joel and Ethan Coen's Fargo. It centers around Fa, a gentle and unassuming woman who is a member of an eccentric religious sect in the Catskill Mountains. Fa's world is turned inside-out when she discovers that the leader of the sect is an impostor on the night before he plans to lead them all in a mass suicide. We're shooting The Kook on 35 mm KODAK (VISION3) 5219 film. It will be around 20 minutes in length. Nat and I are co-directing, and I am also the DP.

Livingston Johnson: We've also made a handful of music videos recently, something we've really enjoyed doing. Greg and I can really whip each other into frenzied states when we're throwing around ideas. Nothing feels better than the process of creating, although our one fatal flaw is that we often play basketball when we should be working.

The AICP Show is currently touring museums and cultural institutions around the country and abroad. The tour schedule, along with the entire Show archive, including the winning spots from Mitnick and Livingston-Johnson (Peking), are available for viewing at www.aicpshow.com.

When I got the fellowship, I had just enrolled in the UCLA Informational Studies program and knew I wanted to go into archiving, but I really didn’t know what direction I wanted to go. So, the Kodak program was great because it gave me six weeks of summer working experience where I saw how things really worked in the world of Hollywood.

On my first day, Rick Utley (vice-president of PRO-TEK) sat me down and we talked about film and how it’s not the studios’ ‘cultural heritage’ that is driving preservation, but really it’s ‘market dollars’ that are driving this. Studios can make money from these old materials. That helped me get my mind around why things were happening.

The archivist job at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena came up in 2005, and was an opportunity to manage an archive from the ground up.

We have a photographic collection which consists of slides, prints, negatives. We have film and videotape. We have audiotape and lots of paper, including brochures, programs, posters, catalogs, all kinds of printed materials.

One thing I learned quickly was the cost involved in preservation. One of the big challenges is knowing what needs to be done and not having the money to do it. We’ve got thousands of documents. It just wouldn’t be practical or useful to scan everything; we can’t save everything, we need to prioritize things.

More and more content is created digitally, so we want to start archiving it digitally and that’s a huge obstacle because there are no common processes, standards or procedures in place to do that. We want to make sure we can open files in a year, or five or ten years. And we want to make sure we store everything properly so if we have to migrate it to a different format, we can do that.

But technology is also creating a whole new set of opportunities. As we scan images, we can share them more, we can open up our collections more; we can do more outreach, put more moving images and photography on line, build our presence. Access will be a lot easier, including for people who may not be able to visit our center.

In smaller archives like this – and there are a lot of archives like this – an archivist is not just a person who preserves material, the archivist is also a manager and a collector and a processor and an educator and a fundraiser and an entrepreneur.

And I have to become a bit of a technologist, also. The archivists’ world and the information technologists’ world really haven’t been together; we speak different languages and have different ideas on preservation, but we need to start working together more closely because we both have a role in preserving digital images digitally and making them available digitally.

A job like mine is changing and broadening. I’m working with an intern this summer and I’m encouraging her to do internships at different types of places; I tell her it’s really important to keep an open mind, to get different perspectives. That was important for me. What’s great about the places you get to work in the Kodak program is that you see aspects of the industry that you might not see in a traditional internship, so you get an inside look on how things go.

For me, the Kodak Fellowship was part of the big scope of things and without that experience I wouldn’t be confident about tackling the things we need to tackle. It opened my eyes and I can always draw upon that experience.

Richard (Rick) Utley is the divisional vice president of PRO-TEK Preservation Services for FPC, Inc., a Kodak company. He is Kodak’s primary liaison with studio asset protection managers and other moving image content owners in addition to supervising the PRO-TEK preservation vaults, inspection center and restoration management services.  His relationship with cinematography includes almost 40 years of collaboration on the final print product.

Utley began his career in the motion picture industry in 1966 as an apprentice at Metrocolor Laboratories on the MGM Studio lot. He spent 24 years at Metrocolor and was superintendent of lab operations from 1983 to 1989. Utley was manager of lab operations for Technicolor, Inc., in Los Angeles from 1989 until he joined Kodak in May of 1993 to develop a new technology business of preservation vault services for FPC, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Kodak. At PRO-TEK, he has been largely responsible for preserving the work of cinematographers through virtually all-major studio clients.

A member of the Association of Moving Image Archivists (AMIA) since 1993 serving on their board of directors as Treasurer for six years.  His desire to see students of media preservation have a better understanding of the industry led him to develop the Kodak Fellowship that includes a six week internship working within the industry utilizing both photochemical and digital tools.  He initiated and grew the vendor exhibit at the annual conference where over 25 vendors of preservation and restoration products and services are displayed.

He is also an active member of the Association of Cinema Video Laboratories (ACVL) and SMPTE.

Background Information - Restoration
PRO-TEK has been involved in many theatrical restorations of notoriety; My Fair Lady with Robert Harris and James Katz, the initial inspection work on “God Father”, “Magnificent Men and Their Flying Machines” 65mm original camera negative, “Vertigo”, “Rear Window”, “To Kill a Mockingbird” and Godfather I, II and III (digital) to name a few.

It was called 'Standard 8mm' back then and was actually 16mm film with twice as many perforations (as regular 16mm) along each side. The film was loaded into a camera, exposed along half its width, flipped and exposed along the other half. In processing, the film was slit down the middle; the result was two lengths of 8mm film, each with a single row of perforations along one side - and four times as many frames as 16mm film.

In 1965, Kodak had a series of better ideas. Keep the 8mm film width, but make the perforations smaller. Make the image area larger. Package the film in a 50-foot cartridge that didn't require flipping or later slitting. And call the result 'Super 8'.

By the 1970's, Super 8 was enormously popular. A 50-foot cartridge had enough film for 3 minutes and 20 seconds of continuous shooting at 18 frames per second. For a while, a 200-foot cartridge was available and so was Super 8 film with a magnetic stripe for analog sound. Today, Super 8 is silent and available in black and white reversal stocks -- and in color reversal and color negative film.

Like all Kodak film, Super 8 starts out as a 'wide roll', 54-inches wide by 2000 feet long. That's made in Rochester. But then comes the 'finishing': the roll is slit into 16mm widths, perforated, split down the middle, cut into 50-foot lengths, and loaded into cartridges. The cartridges are labeled, inspected, sealed into foil pouches, and put into boxes. One wide roll produces almost 20,000 finished cartridges.

Originally that finishing took place in Rochester, then was moved Kodak's plant in Chalon France, then to Windsor Colorado. Now, as Kodak consolidates its film operations, Super 8 finishing is on its way back to Rochester, where the film is made.

"The company wouldn't have made the investment to relocate our Super 8 finishing operation back in Rochester," said Lincoln G. Miller, Kodak manager for motion picture finishing, "unless we thought this would be good business for the future."

And who uses Super 8? Students, of course. "The new operation in Rochester won't be up and running until late September, or early October," said Miller. "So we had to produce enough inventory before we shut down the equipment for the move because film schools start up in September."

But, beyond the work of students, Super 8 finds its way into productions of a more diverse group of filmmakers than you might imagine.

With Super 8 gates available for high end scanners and the availability of non-linear editing systems, filmmakers can shoot Super 8, but edit digitally. Although most of the film ends up on DVD, some filmmakers have opted to blow it up and cut it into 16mm and even 35mm film prints for the cinema screen.

Oliver Stone and his cinematographer Robert Richardson, ASC used it in parts of 'The Doors', 'Natural Born Killers', 'Nixon', and 'JFK', but it's also been cut into more than 30 other recent films from 'Armageddon' to 'Zoolander', from 'Pearl Harbor' to 'The Devil Wears Prada'.

It's used also for special looks and purposes on television programs, including 'Cold Case', 'Frasier', 'Sex and the City', and 'American Idol', and other series; National Geographic and other specials; and, on a regular basis, it's used on the History Channel, the Playboy Channel, and MTv.

And, it appears in a whole variety of commercials and music videos.

"Right now, John Mellencamp is doing a US tour and he's already gone through 17,000 feet of KODAK VISION3 Super 8 film, with more concert dates left to shoot" said Jonathan Barlow, worldwide product manager for Entertainment Imaging. "Super 8 is popular in the music market, probably because video producers like the 'handheld camera look', the 'home movie look' they get out of it."

After almost 45 years in the marketplace, "Super 8 sales are actually very steady," said Barlow. "I think it's being rediscovered in some places. The KODAK EKTACHROME film still leads the pack, but having KODAK VISION stocks available in Super 8 has really caught on with the professionals. It's given them a 500 speed product with little or no grain in an 8mm image. That's been unheard of before now."

But Barlow sees Super 8 playing another, more fundamental role in filmmakers' lives and careers. "If they learn on film, they can pretty much shoot on anything after that, but if they start out on film, they have a tendency to want to stay with film," he said. "I think all aspiring cinematographers want to shoot on film because of film's unique qualities -- and Super 8 gives them an inexpensive way to do that."

Hype:   Digital capture is faster because it requires less lighting.

Reality:  Even the best high-end digital cameras have less latitude and dynamic range than film delivers.  Lighting for digital becomes more -- not less -- of a concern and often translates into more time and money spent on production.

Hype:  Digital is faster because you can see the final results of the image on set.

Reality:  Play back on set doesn't guarantee accuracy later because there are other variables involved. Color correction and image manipulation in post production are still required to create the final ‘look’, whether the origination medium is film or digital. 

Hype:  Digital is always cheaper.

Reality:   Money saved on the purchase and developing of film stock -- and transferring images to tape or digital files – is often lost on longer production times and added post-production costs for digitally-originated movies.

Hype:   High Definition is higher definition.

Reality:  Film is capable of twice the resolution of HD, so compared to film, High Definition is really just ‘Half Definition’. And since the next phase of TV technology (‘Ultra Definition’) will double resolution from current HD standards, content shot in today's HD resolution will have the same future quality issues that standard definition (SD) video has today.

Hype: Digital looks as good as film

Reality:  In addition to film’s tangible advantages -- dynamic range, latitude, highlight detail, and flesh tone reproduction – film has the intangible ‘film look’.  Film is a randomly-sampled system that ‘sees’ similar to the way the human eyes see the world; digital creates images in a rigid pattern on a grid.  After many years and multiple billions of dollars, digital still can't match all the qualities and benefits film delivers.

Hype:   Digital lasts forever.

Reality:  According to the Library of Congress, the best magnetic storage media can be depended on for perhaps a decade. Once a digital signal is gone, it’s gone forever.  Since 1956, more than 80 electronic formats have come and gone, along with related equipment. No video format is forward or backward compatible - and even when the media survives, there is no guarantee the equipment will. With a fresh roll of film, a filmmaker today can load a 30 or 40 year old camera and record images that will last a lifetime: images that can forever be viewed with light and a lens.

Hype:  In cinemas, movies projected digitally should be shot digitally.

Reality:  Film has more than enough resolution for the highest resolution digital projection system.  That's why the vast majority of movies, regardless of how they're projected, are shot on film.

Hype;  Digital projection systems have replaced film systems in most theatres today.

Reality:  Ten years after digital cinema systems were projected to be an overnight success, they've been installed on only about 12% of US cinema screens -- and about 8-percent of cinema screens worldwide. All the rest are showing film.  Conversion is coming slowly because the film system is rugged, reliable, available, and well-understood.

Hype:  Digital prints are sharper and cleaner than film prints.

Reality:  In theatres where the exhibitor pays attention to the equipment, film prints can be every bit as sharp and clean as digital prints.  Digital cinema systems provide benefits in terms of automation and efficiency, but cinemas that don't maintain their film equipment most likely won't maintain their digital equipment either.