Warners Announces Titles For
New Restoration Process
By Rich Drees
May 24, 2007-
Warner Brothers Studios have announced that they will be going
into their vaults for the first five titles to receive their new
4K resolution restoration process.
Bladerunner
(1982), Bonnie And Clyde, Cool Hand Luke (both
1967) and two films from Clint Eastwood’s popular Dirty Harry
series – Magnum Force (1973) and Sudden Impact
(1983) – will undergo the new process in preparation for release
in both standard definition DVD and in one or both of the two
current high-definition DVD formats- HD-DVD and Blu-ray Disc.
The new process utilizes 4,000 scanning lines per frame of film,
offering four times as much picture information than is found in
the currently used 2K resolution process.
Bladerunner
has already been announced for a DVD release later this year to
celebrate the film’s 25th anniversary.
Chris Cookson, president of Warner bros Technical Operations
told the
Hollywood Reporter, “When you are doing restoration,
you want to recreate a new element to support the title for
years to come. It is critical that you retain as much of the
original information that the filmmaker created as possible.
Unless you are willing to work at 4K, it is inevitable that you
will lose a great deal of the information that was created and
included in the (original) finished film.
"The 2K master has less information than the original film did.
We really need to push for 4K tools in order to protect what
goes into our vault for archiving."
