About the restoration

The restoration of Out 1: noli me tangere was made from the original edited film negative (16 mm) for the image and from the magnetic mix (16 mm) for the sound. The 8 episodes were restored almost simultaneously.

The digitalization of the image was done at a very high resolution (6K image files, 16-bits at the time of the digitalization, downscaled to 2K, 16-bits for the restoration and color grading).

The film negative was damaged due to the passing of time, including dust, scratches, abrasions, watermarks and mold. Most of the flaws were corrected. Special care was given to the preservation of the original texture of the image (film grain and definition), keeping the characteristic elements of a 16 mm film intact.

Camera hairs were hardly corrected, if at all: firstly because they were not caused by a later degrading of the negative, but were the result of the shooting conditions (a 16 mm camera, long takes); secondly because their correction would have required a large amount of money, and in certain cases it could have contributed to the creation of undesirable artifacts in the restoration.

Olivier Veinat did the color grading projecting the film on a big screen, under the supervision of the director of photography Pierre-William Glenn.

Out 1: Spectre is the short version of Out 1: noli me tangere, edited by Jacques Rivette a year after the latter. Instead of using the image and sound elements from Spectre as the starting point of the restoration, we re-edited it with the image and sound that had been restored from Noli me tangere, thereby guaranteeing an optimal quality of image as well as sound. A 35 mm print made in the 1990s by the Archives Françaises du Film [the French Film Archive] served as a reference for the editing. Only a few missing shots from Noli me tangere were taken from the internegative of Spectre and reinserted.

Christian Lurin
Heritage Pole Director
Technicolor Entertainment Services France S.A.S