Dr. Strangelove –– Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love 4K

Digital technology is something film archivists approach with great caution, but when Grover Crisp, Sony Pictures Entertainment's vice president of asset management and film restoration, embarked on the challenge of restoring Stanley Kubrick's dark comedy Dr. Strangelove: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, he decided to do the work as a 4K DI at film and digital post facility Cineric in New York.

Unfortunately, the original negatives of the black-and-white 1964 film, starring Peter Sellers and George C. Scott and shot by Gilbert Taylor, were long ago rendered useless. The best material available was a mid-'60s vintage fine-grain positive that had suffered some damage over the past four decades, as well as a dupe negative and a print that could both be used to help fill in the picture information that were damaged in the fine-grain print.

Crisp, Cineric President Balazs Nyari and Tom Heitman, the company's head of film restoration, set out over a year ago to scan the fine-grain version at 4K resolution, use digital grading and restoration tools on the resulting DPX files and then film the results out to create a new negative that could be used to generate prints.

The original film elements were scanned at 4K on the company's Oxberry CineScan 6400 scanner that uses a CCD chip made by Kodak. After the material was brought into the digital realm, the company made use of da Vinci's Revival image restoration system to tackle issues such as shrinkage, dust, noise and flicker. DeVincent then began the process of shot-to-shot grading using the Autodesk Lustre system. A former timer in the photochemical world, DeVincent feels more comfortable with Lustre than with some of the color correctors that come from a linear environment.

Working in black and white, DeVincent explains, can be more difficult in some ways than working in color. "Any shot-to-shot difference in the blacks," he says, "becomes more apparent. Black-and-white film is so sensitive to contrast and slight differences in the original lab's chemistry are more obvious because there's no color information to distract you. There are differences in the chemistry or the temperature from day to day and that can change the way the film looks, especially in the blacks, so that was something I spent a lot of time on with Lustre."

The corrected DPX files were stored on LTO-3 tape and also filmed out using a Lasergraphics film recorder. The "new negative" was recorded onto a Kodak black-and-white emulsion normally used for still photography, which was re-perfed specifically for this application. YCM Laboratories in Burbank processed the film. Sony Pictures used the negative to strike a print that screened at the London Film Festival and the company will vault it along with other materials from its libraries.

Though this version of Dr. Strangelove could be treated as a new master, Crisp and DeVincent wouldn't dream of disposing of the original film elements. "That's the kind of mistake people made a long time ago," DeVincent laments. "Not everyone is comfortable using digital technology as a form of film preservation."

DeVincent is delighted with the results of his company's work but also cautions, "People might look back at this 10 or 15 years from now, when they're doing everything in 12K or something like that and say, 'What were they thinking?' Sony Pictures will keep the fine-grain print and the dupe neg and the print in their archives. However great you think the newest digital tools are, you never want to get rid of the film elements."

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