For more than a century, motion pictures have told our stories. Where still photography captures a moment in time, moving images preserve the very breath and immediacy of life.

WHY WE SCAN AND RESTORE MOTION PICTURES

By 1892, William Laurie Dickson and Thomas Alva Edison had developed the motion picture camera and the 35mm film format, which is still the standard professional film format to this day.

Mission

Preserve our film heritage by high resolution individual frame scanning, bring out the subtle details in the photographic image, and at the same time, do no harm to the original in the scanning process. In the digital domain apply sophisticated film restoration technology to present the image as originally conceived.

Filming of "The King Of Jazz" in Two Color Technicolor in 1930

The Two Color (Red/Green) Technicolor method, as conceived in 1917 and refined during the 1920s was often used to film extravagant, high value productions, such as the musical "The King Of Jazz", featuring Paul Whiteman and his Orchestra. It delivered excellent results when the set colors were chosen appropriately. Flesh tones were exceptionally well reproduced. Only few Two Color camera negatives have survived.

Vision

After restoration, film should be made available for viewing, so generations of viewers to come will still have access to "The" artform of the 20th Century.

Watch: "The King of Jazz" (1930), reel one

Scanned from an original two-color Technicolor dye print, this first reel of "The King of Jazz" shows Paul Whiteman and his Orchestra in all the extravagance of early Technicolor filmmaking. The print suffers from color breathing, but is still an incredible film treasure and a joy to watch.

Filming of "Stairway To Heaven" in Three Strip Technicolor in 1946

Fully developed in 1932, the Three Strip (Red/Green/Blue) Technicolor process with perfect natural color rendition replaced the Two Color Process. By 1946, the same Technicolor cameras were used as in the 1930s, exposing three strips of black and white 35mm film at the same time through a beam splitter with red/green/blue filters. For filming while recording sound, the camera had to be encased in a large lead lined blimp to minimize the camera noise, which was very loud.

Filming of "Fantasia" in Three Strip Technicolor and multi-channel "Fantasound" in 1940

The visionary Walt Disney not only wanted to create a masterpiece with sophisticated hand drawn animation and Three Strip Technicolor in his 1940 film "Fantasia", he also wanted to add sound that would move with the image. He used four optical tracks (three sound tracks, one control track) to provide an immersive sound experience. In this picture, Leopold Stokowski can be seen on the podium with rear projection of orchestra members behind him.

Since 1927, viewers expected original sound with the movies. Newsreels were no exception, and special newsreel cameras were developed that could record sound on film in the same camera that also filmed the moving image. A "sound man" was needed, however, who would control the sound coming from the microphone. Original newsreel footage has only survived sporadically, and what has survived, needs to be preserved.

Watch: Fox Tönende Wochenschau, 1936

Fox Tönende Wochenschau was the German branch of the American newsreel company Fox Movietone News. In 1936, it was still producing excellent sound newsreels of events in Europe, while having to comply with the censorship laws of Nazi Germany. This rare compilation includes footage rarely seen anywhere: the arrival of the US Olympic team in Germany for the 1936 Berlin Games, and Charles Lindbergh's visit to Berlin, where he flew the giant Junkers G 38. It was scanned from an original 35mm nitrate release print, shown in movie theaters in the 1930s.

Newsreel crews filming a Southern Senator in 1938

A lost Vitaphone treasure: "The Evolution of Dixie" (1927)

In 1926, Warner Brothers' Vitaphone system brought sound to the movies, with music and voices played from a disc synchronized to the film. Alongside feature films like "The Jazz Singer", theaters showed short films with live-recorded sound.

This rare Vitaphone short, most likely filmed at the Vitaphone studios in New York in June 1927, was long forgotten and possibly believed lost. It features the Vitaphone Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Herman Heller, playing the overture to "The Evolution of Dixie."

Most of the print had survived intact, but it had already begun to give off the telltale smell of decaying nitrate, a sign that time was running out. Some frames, like the one below, were badly cracked. Luckily, the original Vitaphone disc had survived too. In this video, we share a little of the film's history, show how we scanned the film, and play the original disc, bringing picture and sound back together almost a century later.

A badly cracked frame from the middle of the reel, and an intact frame from the same nitrate print.

A musical treasure from the 1940s

This nitrate print of a musical short from around 1947 brings together four stars of the era: Lawrence Welk playing the "12th Street Rag", Frankie Carle playing "Charmaine", Derry Falligant singing "In Love With Love", and the unforgettable Ethel Smith at the Hammond organ. Watch closely, and you'll notice that Derry Falligant's name is misspelled as "Falligrant" on the sheet music shown in his introduction.

The print was in very good condition, except at the very end: the film had split during Ethel Smith's performance, cutting off the final chords of the music. We repaired those last feet of film by hand, scanned the print on our sprocketless Moviestuff Mark II scanner, and restored it with AlgoSoft VIVA Pro. To our knowledge, this film cannot be seen anywhere else.

Do you recognize the tune Ethel Smith is playing? We'd love to hear from you.