Thaindian News

May 15, 2010 (Sampurn Wire):Reliance MediaWorks Ltd. - India’s fastest growing film and entertainment services company and a member of the Reliance ADA – which operates the world’s largest and most advanced restoration facilities, has restored Mrinal Sen’s award-winning film Khandahar, one of Indian cinema’s greats, that premieres in the Cannes Classic 2010 programme on 15th May, 2010.

The original 1984 Khandahar which tells the story of a city-based photographer who falls in love with a heartbroken woman living in a ruined village, had suffered from a number of material issues including bad splices, tearing, dirt, scratches, flickers, stabilization, grains, noises, splice bumps, and image warps. Similarly the film’s audio was impaired with various anomalies following years of deterioration.

As a part of the National Film Archive of India’s initiative for digital restoration and content processing of over 1000 classic films, Reliance MediaWorks undertook a pristine restoration process for Khandahar, at its India facility, which is one of the world’s largest comprehensive digital restoration and content processing services facilities. Spread over 90,000 sq ft, the facility employs trained digital image processing artists and is built as per Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) standards.

The Reliance MediaWorks team repaired Khandahar’s film reels and carried out a chemically cleaning process using an ultrasonic film cleaning system to remove the physical dirt and residues. The audio and images were processed through a series of automatic restoration modules and manually repaired by skilled restoration artists to clean up the majority of the problems. The film was digitally captured in 2K resolution, without any pre-processing, using a film scanner specially designed for scanning archival films which preserved the resolution and arrangement without clipping or crushing the image of the original film.

Khandahar now benefits with sharper, consistent visuals and audio. The restored files were color graded under guidance of veteran filmmaker Mr. Govind Nihalani and rendered out in XYZ as per DCI specification, therefore resulting in a richness of colour. The film was encoded into Digital Cinema Package (DCP) in the original aspect ratio of 1.37 along with French subtitles.

“Reliance MediaWorks has a unique blend of best in class restoration tools and proprietary technologies, coupled with organically created talent pool that enables us to offer the optimum combination of scale, skills and solutions for all restoration needs including challenging restoration projects like Khandahar.” Said Hemen Doshi, COO Digital Media Imaging (Media outsourcing arm of Reliance MediaWorks)

Anil Arjun, CEO Reliance MediaWorks said: “In a relatively short time frame, Reliance MediaWorks has established an integrated international presence in the film restoration service space and offers high end restoration and image enhancement services across India, US, UK and Japan. Our processes are internationally bespoke and ground-breaking as we continue to develop our technology. We are honoured to have worked on restoring Khandahar and excited that the Cannes International Film Festival has recognized Khandahar in its Cannes Classics 2010 section”.

-Sampurn Wire