We wanted to give you a little insight into the process we put every new film through which we are releasing in the Unearthed Classics series.

Upon receipt of the original 35mm film elements at our film labs, each feature length film is repaired, cleaned and transferred in high definition direct to hard drive in file format.

Each lab roll is hand inspected, leadered and then cleaned in a Mark VI CF3000 Ultrasonic cleaning machine. Each film is then native scanned, 1920 x 1080 full bandwidth, 4:2:2, YUV on the Cineglyph. The NOVA (formally Cineglyph) designed, engineered and built by FDT ([Film Data Technologies] formerly DAV [Digital Audio & Video]) produces the cleanest, least noise, least artifacting, minimally processed signal of any full bandwidth telecine on the market today.

Color correction is done scene-to-scene. During the color correction session settings are established for each change in a roll before the actual telecine transfer takes place. Changes that require new set-ups include variations in lighting, filtration, exposure, speed or stock. The senior colorist or telecine operator is aiming for consistency as the entire roll is examined.

Once the material arrives inside the computer it is converted in real time to the DVCPro HD 1080 24p (23.98sf) codec on the fly and recorded to the RAID array. The material is then edited and authored in the pure digital workspace using the DVCPro HD QuickTime 1920x1080/24p codec. By keeping this material in a pure digital format from beginning to delivered product there are minimal generational loss problems. The process is completely tapeless.

The final masters are delivered on external SATA hard drives ready for final digital color and picture enhancement on a 2.5 GHZ dual processor G5 Power MAC. Color and picture enhancement is done using a number of post-production image enhancing software like Final Cut, Shake and Furnace.

While tremendous care and effort is spent cleaning, color correcting, transferring and preserving these films, these films are not restored frame by frame in a 2K environment. By no means is this an exhaustive remastering process, unfortunately we do not have the resources an effort like that would require, but we are confident that it is the most significant effort being made to preserve these type of films in the market today.

All the films in this series are being transferred in HD as described above with the exception of "Broken Sword" and "Flying Swordsgirl", which were transferred in Standard Def.