[FCP-L] The Real story about controversial WW2 film archival procedures

I don't want this to seem like spam, but the Cinematographers Mailing
List and the Telecine Interest Group have been having a raging debate
for most of the day about a series on the History Channel on World War
2. It seems that people were worried that the director of the film had
carelessly destroyed priceless historical WW2 color footage by
incorrectly transferring it with a RED camera and some projectors.
This is false.

I just interviewed Mr. Lumiere on the telephone for about an hour.

The guy is not an idiot. The story about how the film was destroyed as
it was projected was taken out of context. It DID happen that on a
single reel of someone's 8mm footage, there was some small - but
recoverable - damage to the sprockets.

The footage of someone shooting stuff off a wall was some 8mm footage.
And they DID actually use low-cost home video cameras at the National
Archives to shoot the projection screen so that they could know what
they needed to come back and have professionally transferred.

All of the National Archives footage was transferred professionally on
a C-Reality telecine direct to ProResHD 4:2:2 or in some cases
uncompressed HD.
All of the stuff from Europe was transferred on a Cinetel telecine to
HD QTs.

The footage from the Navy and Marines was transferred using what Mr.
Lumiere describes as a "telecine where they replaced the old
camera" (which he thinks was an Ikegami) with a RED. My guess is that
this probably wasn't a real telecine, but a film chain, which is
similar.

He also described the way the footage was searched for using an
elaborate FileMaker database and that one of the benefits of his
project is that now, large amounts of the National Archives footage
that had never been well cataloged before is now very precisely and
accurately cataloged.

He also described the goal of the editing of the program, which seems
very unique in documentary editing.

I will transcribe the entire interview as quickly as possible and put
it up on www.provideocoalition.com. I'll respond again when it is
ready. It was a very enlightening interview.

Steve Hullfish

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

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