Callas Forever

BBC Post Production has worked on a number of HD film projects for commercial clients. A recent task undertaken by the post production team was to produce a high quality transmission and duplication master of the Franco Zeffirelli film, Callas Forever, for the Japanese television market.

Callas Forever is a “what-if” fantasy where the director explores what would have happened if the legendary opera singer had been helped in her latter days. Upon seeing this great performer’s voice decline due to throat disease and living a life of bitter seclusion in Paris, Larry Kelly, her former manager, suggests a daring comeback wherein he advises Callas to lip-sync some of her greatest hits of the past to a new audience to lift her out of depression. However, despite this entertaining but fantastical twist, the real-life eventual outcome remains unchanged.

Callas Forever allowed the BBC Post Production team to explore the cross-converting possibilities offered by HD technology in order to maximise the visual quality of the piece and increase its export potential. The original film arrived as five print rolls and a 525 digibeta, and the objective was to produce a high quality master on the Panasonic HDD5 tape format. This tape system is often used for extremely high quality film work as it applies less data compression to the HD signal that some other tape formats, thus preserving its quality.

The film print was scanned, with appropriate grain and noise management at HD resolution (1080x1920 pixels), using our Spirit HD Telecine and transferred to an intermediate HDD5 tape. As the frame rate of the Japanese television system, and indeed many other television systems, is significantly different from that used in the Cinema industry, the film transfer required cross conversion techniques which create additional frames and thus avoid gross changes in the speed of the film.

Cleanup and restoration of blemishes, due to dirt or emulsion damage, was achieved by transferring the intermediate recording into our Quantel eQ High Definition editing and finishing workstation. This system stores the data in a completely uncompressed form so avoiding any loss of quality during these intermediate stages. Paint and Restore tools within the eQ system were used to paint out blemishes using data from previous and following frames or by cloning data from adjacent areas.

Sound tracks were added and synchronised at this stage in the eQ and the finished piece played out to the HDD5 tape format for delivery.

This cross-conversion is an apt example of the ability of BBC Post Production’s team to take the hassle out of HD for their clients and deliver what the client requires; all the while creating formats that allow the business to respond to the worldwide sales potential for HD output.

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