Archive notice: This article was originally published on November 19, 2012. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
CinePostproduction has restored "The NeverEnding Story" and thus adapted it to today’s viewing habits. According to CinePost, one of the challenges was that the German version existed only as a duplicate positive. This made it clearly different from the shorter international version on original negative, which was superior in sharpness, colour brilliance and grain behaviour. With a restoration workflow tailored specifically to the project, centred on the internally developed ReFine tools, CinePostproduction carried out the image corrections shot by shot.
According to the company, the original negative served as the basis for the restoration, supplemented by the missing sequences from the German version, which was almost 7 minutes longer, from the duplicate positive. Unusual for a Blu-ray HD restoration: Because it was a CinemaScope format whose anamorphically distorted images did not fill the full width of a 35 mm negative, the restoration team decided to scan both versions in 3K. This made it possible to achieve an actual resolution of 2.5K across the full image-content width of the negative.
After analysing every individual shot, CinePostproduction developed a workflow in which each individual image was assigned to one of eight categories according to its restoration needs and thus to different restoration steps using the corresponding ReFine tools, such as “Deflicker”, “Dirt Removal”, “Grain Management” and “Stabilize”. The internally developed tools enable efficient and image-accurate adjustment of brightness fluctuations, image stabilisation, dirt removal or reduction of film grain without generating artefacts through the processing.
Colour correction also required a great deal of time in advance to analyse the look of various cinema prints, broadcast tapes and DVDs. Colourist Meike Weimann explained that restorations particularly require a feeling for a film’s colour treatment at the time, since hardly any material remains that shows the work in its original state. Cinema prints, for example, suffer colour drift over the years, while older transfers were produced to old television standards and do not necessarily reproduce the original version.
It seems Michael Ende’s story is far from having run its course.
