As a big 4K Blu-ray fan, it was a delight to visit the team at Silver Salt restoration several weeks ago, where I learned about the 4K Blu-ray restoration and HDR mastering process. I looked at the meticulous restoration work that goes into taking a film from its negatives, all the way to the finished product we collectors have stuffing our shelves. During my visit, I got to speak to the team and hear their in-depth knowledge and expertise, and while we discuss plenty of movies and projects Silver Salt had worked on, the main movie I was there to discuss was the 1958 Hammer classic Dracula (known as Horror of Dracula in the US) starring Christopher Lee as the titular vampire, with Peter Cushing as Van Helsing. Arguably Hammer’s most iconic movie and easily one of Silver Salt’s biggest projects, I saw a glimpse into the work being done to bring this classic flick to new life. A painstaking restoration
(Image credit: Future) For a more in-depth look at the initial stages before the restoration process (table inspection, cleaning and scanning) check out my previous article here . Once the digital files have been scanned in, these DPX files are handed over to the restoration artists, who must then go through the painstaking process of removing excess dirt, tidying up film grain (but not too much) and a general maintenance and tidy on each individual frame. After being shown some of the work that goes into this restoration process on other titles (which you can again read about in my previous article) I speak with Paul Gowlett, the Project Lead for Hammer at Silver Salt Restoration. He’s overseeing Dracula and gives me a glimpse into the work that’s gone into revitalising this Hammer classic. One particularly arduous process he shows me involves the movie’s opening sequence (a shot of the exterior of the castle, walking amongst some tombstones). During this shot, which lasts approximately 90 seconds, Gowlett points to the bottom of his monitor and points out a hair. “It was part of the original presentation of the film, but was a production issue of the cleaning the camera gate, it is not intentional” he tells me. This brings me back to an earlier conversation I’d had with Anthony Badger, Head of Restoration at Silver Salt. He said “It can be a bit of an ethical dilemma on how much we intervene, but we need to consider if an extreme problem will take you out of the story.” Although the hair was part of the ‘original film’ it could serve as a distraction. A shot of Christopher Lee as Dracula, with the original file on the left and the remaster on the right, the latter of which shows much more color and depth
Original raw file
Remastered
Gowlett informed me that each individual digital frame had to be checked for this hair. Each frame was removed digitally by using information from frames from later on in the shot, leading to the final image. The final result: a staggering 2000 frames. When I asked Gowlett how long it had taken him to remove this hair, he said several days. All for 90 seconds of footage. It was just a clear indication of how much work had gone into this project. The other issue the team found with the original film (which was prevalent in the digital files) was a heavy amount of yellow staining. This yellow staining was only apparent when isolating the ‘blue channel of the image’ in the restoration process…
