Please excuse cross-postings, but this is an event you do not want to miss!
THE REEL THING TECHNICAL SYMPOSIUM A special 22nd edition of The Reel Thing Technical Symposium will be held in Los Angeles on August 21-22, 2009 at the Linwood Dunn Theater at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, in Hollywood, California Hosted by the Association of Moving Images (AMIA) and dedicated to presenting the latest technologies in audiovisual restoration and preservation, The Reel Thing brings together a unique line up of laboratory technicians, format experts, and preservationists. The program includes two days of sessions and screenings including the premiere screening of Walt Disney's digital restoration of "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs", the premiere of the digital restoration of Marilyn Monroe's "How to Marry a Millionaire," presented in CinemaScope, and a surprise sneak preview of a restored classic. Registration details and more information on the program are at: www.the-reel-thing.org <http://www.the-reel-thing.org/> REGISTER NOW! Highlights include: Restoration of the Apollo 11 EVA Footage During this presentation, the system used to capture the extravehicular activity on video during Apollo 11 will be reviewed as well as the process for broadcasting those first live pictures from the moon. NASA's search for the original telemetry tapes which recorded the feed from the moon, and the best surviving elements will also be profiled. A discussion will ensue about the technical and philosophical factors that are guiding the restoration project itself, and how these new restoration capabilities may apply to other genres of moving images. Finally, before and after sequences of images from the ongoing restoration project will be screened in HD resolution. Reclaiming the 'Lost' Lunar Orbiter Survey Photos Early this year, headlines blared the news that backup tapes of the first satellite optical surveys of the moon - long thought to have been lost - had been found and decoded to gorgeous new prints which contained more than twice the resolution of the "official" versions done long ago. This presentation will concentrate on the photographic mission to the moon, how it was conceived and executed, how the 2" instrumentation tapes, which only vaguely resemble quad videotape recordings, came to be made (but until now never used) and what was required to bring success to a project which many thought would be impossible or too expensive to pull off. Resolution Limitations of Film Scanners: More Pixels Do Not Mean More Resolution Includes a discussion of the "4K" versus "2K" debate and future "8K" systems currently under development. Adieu, Sweet Apparition. Hello Sweetheart - Get Me Rewrite! David Giovannoni will discuss recent discoveries and introduce new old sounds. He'll describe the technical challenges of evoking sound from primitive recordings made to be seen, not heard. And he'll recount how the inventor's own voice was revealed after posing for a year as the phantasm of a young woman. After the DI - How to Organize, Catalogue and Protect the Original Negative. About 80% of studio films are now finished as Digital Intermediates and many of these films are still shot on film, or a hybrid of film and digital. For archiving, it makes sense to have a plan to extract, separate and store the actual shots used in the creation of the DI. Content owners may wish to go back to the most original elements from production, for restoration or other reasons. This presentation will cover an efficient and methodical plan for archiving of the original camera negative. Electronic Archiving: Lessons from 8 years in the "DI Trenches." This presentation will focus on the real issues encountered by someone who has been living Digital Intermediate archiving since the inception of DI. The presentation focuses on what really happens when facilities and DI studios try to deal with archiving Petabytes of data. TYPE A Videotape and THE EVERLY BROTHERS The restoration of "Johnny Cash Presents the Everly Brothers Show"-an early 70's TV series that exist only on obsolete type A videotape copies-presented technical challenges far in excess of ordinary video restoration. Archiving, Preserving and Distributing Digital Cinema Collections After three years of work, the original EDCINE approach - based on open standards (as MXF, JPEG2000 and OAIS), a flexible and modular structure and on new standardised profiles for long term preservation - resulted in a 'proof of concept', a working prototype of the 'EDCINE Digital Archive System'. Challenges of Restoring Classic Films in 4K Presentation featuring examples from 4K workflows of restoration projects at Motion Picture Imaging for such films as The Wizard of Oz, North by Northwest, A Star is Born and Gone With the Wind. Featured speakers include Ned Price, Jan Yarbrough, Janet Wilson and Ray Grabowski. REGISTER NOW! www.the-reel-thing.org <http://www.the-reel-thing.org> Association of Moving Image Archivists 1313 North Vine Street Los Angeles, CA 90028 P. 323.463.1500 F. 323.463.1506 E. amia at amianet.org AMIA is a non-profit professional association established to advance the field of moving image archiving by fostering cooperation among individuals and organizations concerned with the acquisition, description, preservation, exhibition and use of moving image materials. AMIA's members range from those who work solely with moving images to organizations where moving images are only a small part of their collection to individuals who want to protect their personal collection - for all those concerned with losing our visual heritage.