Repairing an original material
Why Repair
The fundamental reason for which repairing is an indispensable part of the work of cinematographic restoration will be immediately obvious as soon as you have a vintage film in your hands. In most cases, a film that comes to a laboratory in order to be repaired has "lived" a long life.
If it is a positive copy,
it is likely to have been shown many times; if it is a negative, then it will
have been just as many times through a printing machine. All this will have
brought about a series of damages to the film, sometimes extremely serious,
which render it impossible to run the film through the very machines that are
designed to restore it. The perforations are damaged, broken or on the point of
breaking, sometimes completely missing. The splices have come unglued or the
film is broken in several places, often the break passes through a number of
frames. What is more, the brittleness of the film makes it easy to create
further damage in handling it, verified as soon as the reel is unwound.
Obviously, the first reason for repairing a film is to put it in such a condition as to pass through all the machines that are instrumental in restoring it: washing machines, polishers, printers, etc. Moreover, in some cases, it would be better to intervene in such a way as to render damage less evident. For example, an original splice, which still holds, could have been done badly, so that the overlap is too wide and the film end enters too far into the picture. In this case, even if the splice were mechanically secure, it would be better to reopen it (if possible) and redo it.
How to Repair and How Much to Repair.
The rule should be to repair only what is necessary.
When you are getting ready to repair a film you should consider several factors that might influence your plans as to how much and how to repair. It would be wise to consult with the technicians in charge of printing, polishing and chemical washing in order to get information about the machines that have to be used. For example, there are printers that can print even from originals in which not all the perforations are repaired. Perhaps it is sufficient that only two out of four perforations are repaired, or else only the perforations on one side. These indications must be clear before starting in order to avoid wasting time and effort.
Still another case is that of the intertitles. In many cases these are in bad condition, have serious loss of image and it could be advantageous or necessary to proceed to reproduce them from a single frame (freeze). In this case, it is obviously a waste of time to repair them all.
Another choice that has to be made by the technician in charge or by the customer concerns the methodology of the repairs. As will be seen later when different kinds of repairs are talked about, there are procedures that can get the work done more quickly, but that have other disadvantages: the repairs are too obvious or compromise the stability of the picture to some extent. Clearly, the decision to dedicate more time in order to use the best method or to use one that is less exacting but more rapid depends on choices that have to be made at the source, before the film even gets into your hands.
