Mexico. Benjamín Fernández, director of Digital Sprockets and his color team graduated the image of the film, "El Fuego Inolvidable", released in theaters in September 2014. "El Fuego Inolvidable" tells the story of a group of young people in Mexico who want to drive change in their country. It addresses the controversies of youth, government, and education in the midst of Mexico's bicentennial.
According to Benjamín, for director Fernando Benítez Ontiveros, the goal was to have different color ranges for the different moods and situations that the characters face. During scene changes and story evolution, viewers can almost anticipate the narrative course, thanks to the fact that the color of the film literally fixes each scene.
Benjamin commented that, "Resolve's nodes and window features are great, as they allowed me to isolate areas that needed more attention. Color graduation is critical to the look of the film, as there are changes based on the plot of the story. Taking the time to graduate makes a big difference."
But more than giving the tone and appearance of a movie and telling a story through color graduation, Digital Sprockets gives archived films new life in Mexico. As a telecine expert, Benjamin uses a number of Blackmagic Design products to help him on his mission to travel back in time.
With UHD off the horizon, and the future at our doorstep (in the form of a cardboard box containing a new UHDTV), old movies don't have a chance to survive without the help of experts to take them into the digital age. Otherwise, if they are left in their physical state of photographic film without being digitized, their chances of being seen are almost zero. Every day, Benjamin deals with 35mm sequences that need to be restored and converted to HD, and that often require intense cleaning and repair. Without someone to do this kind of work, Benjamin said, "These movies just go into oblivion."
"I have a couple of clients who have a lot of titles here in Mexico, and they need to transfer all those movies to HD and restore them, because if not, they can't sell the streaming rights for TV or for video-on-demand platforms." So they are transferring these movies to high HD quality and not only to keep them alive, but also to continue to take advantage of them. "
For such an extensive process, Digital Sprockets has turned digital restoration into a science. According to Benjamin, an entire film is digitized using Cintel Millennium II HD datacine, a DaVinci system, and Cintel Image Mill using Cintel Grace for grain and noise reduction. Everything is then transferred in HD, 24p in 444, RGB, DPX to Blackmagic DeckLink 4K Extreme, captured with Media Express to create the DPX sequence. From there, depending on whether the customer just wants the digital sequence or the entire process, Benjamin transfers the file to a hard drive for shipping, or continues with post-production.
