The restoration of 'Lawrence of Arabia' wins the Focal Prize

The 4K restoration and remastering carried out by MTI Film wins recognition for best restoration at the tenth Focal International Awards, presented in London.

The digital restoration work carried out by MTI Film on the film Lawrence of Arabia (1962) has won the award for “best restoration and preservation” at the tenth edition of the Focal International awards, held recently in London (United Kingdom).

The film has been restored in 4K under the direction of Sony Pictures Entertainment's vice president of media management and film restoration/mastering, Grover Crisp.

David Lean's work is considered one of the best films in the history of cinema. Coinciding last year with the fiftieth anniversary of its release, Sony Pictures undertook a meticulous restoration and remastering project in 4K.

It is noteworthy that the original film itself had already suffered during filming due to the heat of the desert, causing hundreds of small vertical cracks in numerous frames. The problem resulted in white columns or rays of light in the exhibit since its debut, getting worse as time went by.

These scratches were very fine with irregular lines about three pixels long, separated by one pixel in a 4K frame. As the entire roll was affected, with unique defects in each frame, the work became a herculean task.

After months of restoration, MIT Film developed new algorithms, creating and modifying existing software to solve the problem. Considerable manual intervention was also required. In some moments of the film, the scratches ran through several scenes, so it was necessary to remove them very carefully to avoid affecting the image, something especially complex when there were faces on the screen. Color correction was supervised by Scott Ostrowsky of Colorworks.