Space 1999

Space:1999 was originally shot on 35mm film and as far as future proofing is concerned they couldn't have done better! Telecine technology used in scanning film for output as video or data has improved dramatically since the era in which the show was made. With a High-Definition re-mastering project and newly struck film elements (produced by Granada International Media in 2004) the scene was set for a dramatic improvement in picture quality for the series.

With Space:1999 though, the new IP elements (a positive image printed on negative stock formerly used for the creation of dupe negatives) made any requirement for negative material obsolete.

Even with the new film elements, a great deal of grading was still required at times - the balancing of hues and contrast levels on a shot-by-shot basis throughout an episode in an effort to maintain quality and correct colour. One example of the significant improvements is that the costumes in the mooncity appear to be grey on the original material, however it actually turns out that they are a buff colour which can now be easily seen in the new transfers.

As part of the process of re-mastering this type of material back to video, there is obviously a requirement to recover as much of the image as possible, as some cropping usually occurred during the original process. This desire to adjust the telecine zoom setting and transfer the maximum possible image has spilled over to a degree into my normal film transfers. Therefore viewer's may now notice certain details towards the edge of picture that may have never been seen before.

The removal of image flaws, blemishes and other markings on the picture caused by physical imperfections or dust on the film surface is achieved in two stages. Firstly, automatic devices are used to reduce film grain and very fine dirt & sparkle on the picture, but it is important not to have this processing too high otherwise an unnaturally flat and "plastic" looking smeary image can result. It's always a compromise between the desire to retain the film look with its inherent graininess and yet remove noise to aid digital compression that might be required in delivery mediums later on such as Digital TV broadcasts or DVD both using mpeg2. Secondly, the noise-reduced pictures are loaded into a hard disk based device controlled by a pen and tablet. This is where the Digital clean-up team go slowly through an episode manually removing obvious remaining defects and areas of larger damage. Basically, this is achieved by using picture information from preceding or following frames, drawing over the damage and matching any movement to invisibly "paint" over the fault.

As well as duped film sections causing a quality change, any added visual elements can themselves contain dirt that further add to the problems, the prime example of this being the opening shot of the series titles. The image of Martin Landau is already quite poor being a fair number of generations away from the original negative, but when the caption appears a pattern of static dirt on the original cell goes across the entire image as well. This shows up dramatically in high definition due to the white backdrop but it is also highly visible over Martin's face and costume.

As the main series credits shots are extremely important and the existing quality of the optically combined shots were rather poor Granada International's Controller Operations Fiona Maxwell agreed to electronically re-building the generic parts of the opening titles from the best available materials in HD.

Lots of these textless background shots still exist as small rolls of negative which were supplied as part of the re-mastering. This material was firstly graded, noise reduced and then manually cleaned-up in the same way as a standard episode to produce the master background shots. I took the opportunity to transfer these elements in both 4:3 and 16:9 widescreen ratios as there was the strong possibility that the latter would be required at some stage. Then the digital data was imported into a non-linear HD editing suite where colleague Steve Jamison went about re-building the sequence with guidance from myself as to which shots to use. Basically, the original optical captions were isolated and re-keyed at the appropriate points over the background shots making sure that things like the position and timing were matched.

High Definition video has only one aspect ratio -16:9 widescreen, so as far as the HD recordings of the 4:3 transfers are concerned they are pillarboxed. This is the 4:3 image sitting centrally with black bars either side where the screen extends to widescreen.

The only slight problem when converting from HD to SD is the possibility of aliasing - a "zinginess" that results from fine horizontal detail approaching the same pitch as the line structure of the SD inter-laced picture.

After the large improvements often made in picture quality due to re-mastering work an area that can sometimes let down the overall result is in the audio department. The current video tape masters exhibited a highly variable sound quality between episodes, with peak distortion, crackle, print-through, wow and other problems. Granada International's Archive co-ordinator Mark Stanborough had extra audio elements shipped over from the States in order to improve matters.

Jonathan Wood. Telecine Colourist, BBC Post Production

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