RCI® Process licensed by VCE to Cinetech

In the summer of 2001, Cinetech, one of the world's premiere film restoration facilities licensed the RCI® process and adapted it for use on their facilities equipment. "Ride Lonesome" a 1959 Cinemascope classic western by director Bud Boetticher and featuring Randolph Scott premiered on November 9 as the first film to be restored using the RCI process at the Regus London Film Festival.

Comparisons to Digital Restoration: (Flying in the face of conventional wisdom)

Price. Digital technology is beginning to offer solutions for saving these records but will continue to be unavailable for most faded films due to cost. The RCI restoration process offers a cost-effective alternative to preserving many film records that might be lost by the time digital restoration technology is affordably priced and practical. But price isn't the only benefit.

The retention of photographic image quality. Current digital scanning technology was developed for modern motion picture color negative film. The optimum range captured digitally using current scanner methodology does not represent the best range for faded color negatives. When faded color negative is optimally captured digitally, the red and green channels contain only 65-75% of possible data while the blue channel contains less than 25% of possible data. In other words, you don't have much data to work with. When this digital data is stretched to fill the proper color space, digital artifacting occurs. This artifacting is called "spectral sampling error" and creates anomalies such as posterization, banding or contouring creating discreet steps in a continuous tone.

RCI® has superior grain structure and image detail to digital scanning and record out at 10-bit 4K. Digital scanning and restoration looses data and lack of data means lack of image quality.

RCI® has superior shadow detail. Although great attention and skill has been afforded to maintaining detail in the shadows digitally, the lack of a solid, meaty negative looses this detail, often blocking up in the digital environment.

While digital restoration offers the ability to repair negative damage seamlessly, most of the faded color negatives of the period are observed with little severe damage. Most common dirt and scratches are removed through standard wetgate printing with RCI. It is recommended that severe damage be repaired digitally and cut into the RCI master element.

Until a good, stable and long lasting archival format is devised for digital data, one which the film industry can agree upon as a standard, there is little or no reason to digitize faded Eastman Color in large quantities, solely for the purpose of balancing the color and spitting it back out to film.

VCE restored many faded color negatives with this process in making Trinity and Beyond. If you are interested in color restoration, please let us know. E-mail VCE with your comments.