American Cinematographer - September 2000 - 164

rolls to

restoration tools;

the

and prevent slight scratches and holes
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dye-sublimation process.
"Funny Girl is going to look fabulous,"
Crisp enthuses.
Nyari proudly notes that his
company has a few other proprietary
tricks up its sleeve. One of Cineric's
central methods brings to mind the
Hippocratic oath's familiar phrase, "First,
do no harm." Multiple runs of old
negatives, nitrate film, YCM separations,
internegatives and interpositives create
wear and tear on already fragile film, so
Cineric devised its Single-Pass System, a
way to evaluate the restoration needs of
an entire feature based on a single
optical-printer run, as opposed to the six
or seven unspoolings typically needed.
This is possible thanks to Cineric's
Cinebase software program. Cinebase
automatically prints seven frames from
each of

film's cuts (the first and last
frames and five frames in between)
a

during the first run through one of the
company's two Oxberry 1100 series
optical printers.
The resultant seven-frame-percut element is then analyzed, timed, re¬
registered and color-corrected. "[Then]
cinex test prints are made until we are
satisfied with the result," Nyari details.
This system is so reliable, he adds, that
very often "our first answer print is the
last print." (At the same time, he
acknowledges that it is not always
possible to make a proper analysis from
only seven frames per cut. That, he
says, is where the company's expertise
in analyzing color film by eye comes
into play.)
Another key tool in the Cineric
arsenal is the full-immersion, adjustable
liquid gate, which the company helped to
invent, Heitman says. "To the best of our
knowledge, we have three of the four
adjustable liquid gates in the world," he
maintains. Nyari explains that an
adjustable liquid gate allows severely
shrunken film to be easily realigned for
optical printing via registration pins that
can be set as small as a two-perf pull¬
down. Liquid gates are common film-

they handle film gently

layers from showing up when the
original is copied. According to Heitman,
the original runs through perchlorethylene in the special gate. Perchlorethylene has the same light-refraction
value

the film, so it prevents

the light

from

bouncing off of the edges of the
defects, rendering them invisible to the
copy film.
Another Cineric specialty is
preservation and restoration of
Techniscope non-anamorphic wide¬
screen films, which is facilitated by the
adjustable liquid gates. Techniscope, now
essentially an abandoned film format,
uses a two-perf pull-down; a tiny 1:23.5
widescreen image is exposed onto the
film using spherical lenses. The
company's most notable such assignment
was George Lucas's 1973 smash hit
American Graffiti, for which Cineric
created an answer print with new timings
in the late 1980s. (Nyari calls the
assignment more of a preservation than a
restoration). "The old timings don't work
with the
notes.
on

new

release stocks," Heitman

Cineric also did

preservation work

Lucas's first feature, the cerebral 1971

sci-fi thriller THX 1138, which was also
shot in the Techniscope format. In

addition, the company recently restored
several

Techniscope titles from the
legendary British Hammer horror
archives, including Curse of the Mummy's
Tomb, which had just been completed at
press time.
Film restoration and preservation,
however, is only part of Cineric's
business. Its primary specialties are
visual effects and titles, including work
on such recent high-profile projects as
the 2000 remake of Shaft, Martin
Scorsese's Bringing Out the Dead, and
last year's surprise smash The Sixth
Sense. They also do digital scene
restoration, video-to-film transfers, film

recording of digital images and blow-ups
from 16mm to 35mm, including the
recent

American

Movie

and

The

Daytrippers. "There is always something
at Sundance from Cineric," Nyari quips.

American Cinematographer - September 2000

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