Restoring color back into Guide

Legendary Indian producer-director-actor Dev Anand decided to colorize and restore the prints of his 1965 classic Guide, made under the Navketan banner, when it was chosen for screening in the Classics section of the Cannes Film Festival this year.

Guide, in which Dev Anand plays the role of a tour guide who finds himself entangled in the affairs of a woman caught in a marital discord that drives him to the brink of his own life.

Guide is based on R.K. Narayan’s novel of the same name. It has Waheeda Rehman in the most fascinating role of her career that gave the actress a chance not only to prove her histrionic abilities, but her dancing talent as well.

Anand approached Goldstone Technologies Ltd, Hyderabad which had colorized Navketan’s 1959 black and white hit Hum Dono, which had Dev Anand in a double role. Nanda and Sadhna played his leading ladies. This is one reason why Dev Anand has opted for color grading of the movie print.

“The original negative had gone through a lot of wear and tear over the years and there were a lot of scratch marks on it. So, the print needed to be restored as the movie is highly popular even today. Dev Anand approached us for the job and we worked on it,” Travis Caddell, managing director of Goldstone Technologies Ltd, said.

Goldstone recently colorized the Kannada movie Satya Harischandra, in which the Kannada film legend Rajkumar played the title role, was originally released in 1965. Apart from restoration and colorization, Goldstone also converted the format of the movie from 35mm to Cinemascope at its Hyderabad facility.

Director Anand wanted to recreate the brilliant colors and delicate beauty of India’s landscape where much of the film is set. Being familiar with da Vinci’s color enhancement products, Anand knew that using these, in conjunction with the modern DI process, would satisfy his needs. However to capture and maintain the full detail and depth of the original negative, he considered completing this project in 4K resolution.

For the film, Anand sought to capture an epiphany of the lead character in a visual sense. He wanted to show audiences a clear distinction between the somber domestic world of Rosie, played by Rehman, and the warm, inviting landscape of tourist sites as a metaphor for Rosie’s change.

He wanted the sharpest possible detail and resolution for the film. He wanted to transport audiences into the world of the film, and felt that only 4K could provide this kind of experience. It was important for him to show the distinction between marital life, which is depicted as somber and rather moody, and India, which is bright, warm and inviting.

Anand preferred working on the da Vinci Resolve at 4K resolution because it produces a much sharper, cleaner, and less noisy look, especially when pushing certain colors. After working on other da Vinci workstations in 2K, adapting to Resolve was quite intuitive. The control panels are virtually the same.

“At da Vinci, our philosophy has always been to create color grading information that is not committed (or baked) into the images until the final tweaks and approvals have been made” said Dean Lyon, director of marketing, da Vinci Systems.

“The mastering or layoff process is when color grade is merged with the footage. This has been

the case throughout our 20 plus

year history of providing color enhancement and image processing solutions to the film and TV industry.”

“Further, da Vinci created the concept of CDL (color decision lists) and PDL (pan decision lists) so that the session metadata can be stored, recalled, adjusted and reapplied to the original source material at any time in the future.”

With the DI process, the film can be cut and re-cut constantly until the last possible moment. This affords a great deal of artistic freedom to a filmmaker, but in the past was a headache for the colorist because the color corrections were always based on the edited time-code and not on the original source code. With Resolve, any color corrections are linked to the original source code, so essentially, the corrections travel along with the image, no matter how many times it is moved around on the timeline.

Whenever the editor on the project gave a new EDL, the system reconforms the color corrected clips to the new EDL and any existing color corrections with that EDL. In fact, the edits are changing right until the material is rendered.

“We first had to scan the source into storage and conform them, but once that was done, they were ready to be graded. In fact, we didn’t even need an EDL to begin the grading on Resolve,” said Anand.

“As long as we had even one clip in storage, we could conform it, load it and begin the grading. Although we don’t use Resolve for conforming, the system does have the option to conform a material list if we so choose. We can load a conformed list onto the system or work with a pre-program list that has already been edited.”

“One of the benefits of Resolve is that it actually generates 2K images of the 4K images. The 2K images are not proxies; they are high-resolution images that make the color grading process go more quickly because we can play them back in real time.

“So we did most of the grading on the 2K images, but with the push a button, we could switch back to the 4K material. This means that with the press of one button, we can instantly toggle between 2K and 4K as needed,” Anand said.

“Whether it is 2K or 4K, is all a matter of subjective opinion and budget realities, but since da Vinci is usually associated with the very high-end of the industry, we were pressed into digital intermediate color grading, in the first instance, and later used to produce a large number of 4K DI’s on high profile projects with our Resolve system,” said Lyon of da Vinci Systems.

“With this invention, da Vinci has developed a considerable toolkit of color grading shortcuts that can be used to ripple or replicate color grading decisions through each edit revision, and provide for multiple versions as well as deliverable formats. ColorTrace is available on the da Vinci 2K Plus as well as the Resolve, and is an unprecedented means of manipulating, tracking and versioning color grading information,” he added.

“The real challenge to handling a 4K DI is much more complex than holding the color grading metadata separate from the images. Storage, bandwidth, throughput, interactivity and real time processing all come to mind. da Vinci, already the leader in 4K digital color grading, upped the ante with its next generation system, R4K, at NAB 2008. The R4K provides a true real time and interactive color enhancement capability working off of shared storage.”

Anand nods in approval. “The movie went through several different looks in the beginning. Resolve allowed us to create multiple saved versions of certain color corrected images for their comparison and selection. We had a plethora of images to choose from and were able to pick the exact look they desired.”

Pretty much every tool in the Resolve palette. However, a lot of the specific colors were created with the unlimited Power-Windows function. For example, when it came to coloring the sky, the team didn’t want it to look just dull and grey. They wanted to add a certain brightness to it that would end up giving it a sombre look. Numerous PowerWindows were placed around the images of the sky to create that effect.

“We also made heavy use of the auto-tracking feature of PowerWindows. Going back to the example of the sky, if, in a certain image, there would be a tilt on the camera or a zoom into an object, the sky would gradually disappear,” Anand adds.

“Obviously we’d have to move the PowerWindow to match the move, following that object. If we didn’t have the auto-tracking feature, this would have been a tedious manual process with the insertion of a lot of keyframes. But with Resolve, there is an automatic tracking scheme whereby the system “looks” at what’s moving within any drawn window and then automatically tracks that object with the window. The process moves quite quickly without need on our part to spend time identifying parts of the image for tracking and linking.”

“Grading is not simply a matter of tweaking colors. It also has to do with sharpening the details of objects in the imagery. After we did a correction, we would use the PowerWindows to isolate the amounts of aperture correction we were applying to a certain object or image in order to sharpen it up or make it look a bit crisper and cleaner.”

“The Indian landscape is bright, warm, and inviting - very picturesque. So it was really a matter of brightening up the imagery of the greenery, the sky, and the overall environment of the region. One of the mistakes that many colorists make when trying to brighten things up is to simply turn up the saturation control. This tends to make the imagery look over-saturated and unnatural; almost cartoonish.

“When brightening an image, we have to strike a very careful balance between primary and secondary coloring. Unfortunately, this is difficult to do with many color correction systems because they only have the typical three channels of RGB. With Resolve we had a fourth channel of color correction - luminance (Y), RGB - which is a black and white channel that affords more control over the luminance of the imagery.

“We were able to achieve the bright, warm look by reducing or changing luminance to get the right look. By taking the luminance up and leaving the RGB unchanged, a slightly less saturated look resulted without desaturation. We were able to delve more deeply into different amounts of saturation in the midtones, lowlights, and highlights of the images.

“At the same time, if we needed to make something higher in color, then we could turn the luminance down slightly to make the colors more vibrant. Ultimately, we had extremely precise control over the grading of specific images and objects within those images.”

A colorist first learning to work in 4K resolution should not to be intimidated just because it’s 4K. Working with 4K is just the same as working with 2K, except you get more detail and better resolution. If you choose to work exclusively with 4K images throughout the grading process, remember that your system will move a little bit slower, simply because of the sheer size of the images.

Guide At Cannes

Although there were no Indian films in the Cannes official selection this year, the 1965 classic film ‘Guide’ starring Dev Anand, who is known as India’s Gregory Peck and Clark Gable, was screened in the Classic section. Guide was screened on 20 May at the Festival des Palais’ Salle Bunuel theatre.

The octogenarian actor/producer attended the screening. “When I got an email from the festival, I jumped with joy,” exclaimed the popular Bollywood star who got his first acting break in 1945 and launched his production company in 1949.

Directed by Anand’s late brother Vijay Anand, ‘Guide’ was a commercial and critical success in India and also made its mark as the first Bollywood film to be shot in two languages - English and Hindi.

“The English version was co-produced by Pearl Buck and was distributed in America,” said Anand. The Hindi version was screened in the Cannes Classic. ‘Guide,’ was also India’s official entry to Oscar’s foreign language category.

Addressing the subject of adultery, ‘Guide’ had its share of roadblocks with India’s censor board, but (the late) Indira Gandhi, then the minister of Information and Broadcast facilitated the clearance, noted Anand.

The popular romantic hero of 1960’s and 70’s, Anand is still active in Bollywood and is currently in pre-production on his next film, Charge Sheet.