Cherry Towers launches new 4K digitization, restoration and cataloging infrastructure

El laboratorio de Enrique Cerezo, dedicado a la restauración del fondo fílmico de Mercury Films, incorpora la última tecnología de Blackmagic Design, Rohde & Schwarz DVS y Digital Vision.

Cherry Towers, the laboratory mainly dedicated to enhancing the film collection of Mercury Films, Enrique Cerezo's distributor, has launched an ambitious project for digitization, film restoration and 4K cataloguing.

The new installed systems will be used to manage at the highest technological level the digitization of the entire Mercury Films celluloid film library, which has the most extensive film catalog in Spain, and its subsequent image and sound restoration. Mercury Films' film portfolio has more than 7,000 national and international films, with worldwide rights to more than 3,500 titles.

The core of the installation is a scanner Blackmagic Cintel for scanning both 35 and 16 millimeter film films, as well as a restoration system Digital Vision Phoenix to fix problems and defects in the scanned image.

All of this has been interconnected to a SpycerBox Ultra SAN centralized storage system from Rohde & Schwarz DVS with 192 TB gross that allows operating from all stations, without the need to copy material between them and with enough bandwidth to work in 4K or even 5 streams of 2K DPX.

The Blackmagic Cintel scanner is connected to a Mac Pro running Davinci Resolve 12. This system allows you to capture film in real time up to Ultra HD resolution at a maximum of 30 fps, either to centralized SAN storage or directly against local storage LaCie 8big Rack Thunderbolt 2 that offers a bandwidth of more than 1000 MB/s for the ingestion of material from the Cintel.

The material is scanned in RAW format from Cintel itself and can be exported to any other desired format (in the case of Cherry Towers it exports to DPX). DVS SpycerBox's fiber optic-based SAN system allows all clients interconnected by fiber optics access to material at speeds of up to 1200 MB/s and playback of 2K/4K material in DPX format in real time.

The SpycerBox SAN is the nerve center in this workflow because it makes it possible for all the material captured by the Cintel scanner to be immediately available on the rest of the workstations. This allows that, once the material has been ingested from the Cintel scanner, you can immediately start with the Digital Vision Phoenix restoration station, which includes the necessary tools to fix those shots that require retouching, cleaning grain, dust... or even fixing entire frames by cloning.

This station is made up of a system HP high performance such as the Z840 with dual 14-core processor with EonStor local storage of 36 TB gross and dual link SAS 12Gb, which allows working up to 4K DPX without compromises and video card AJA Kona 4 for external monitoring.

Once restored and exported in DPX format to the DVS SpycerBox SAN, the material can be imported into an HP Z840 system with Davinci Resolve 12, which allows working up to resolutions higher than 5K in real time, to finally give the final look to the films or small color arrangements.

In this workflow, the DVS Clipster system has also been integrated for mastering the final material in IMF JPEG2000 format among other tasks, such as capturing material on tape, conforming, QC or DCP mastering for cinemas.

In addition, within the project, a branded audiovisual archiving system has been installed Thebes CMS, which incorporates an LTO tape management and recovery system that has been connected to the supplied Quantum robot.

Carlos López, technical manager of Cherry Towers, points out that "our company's experience in the telecination and restoration of cinematographic films spans several decades, and I would like to express the great satisfaction we have for the equipment and the quality and resolution of the engineering that was provided, as well as for the installation and training received, but above all for the high quality of the final result that we are obtaining."

At the technological forefront

This turnkey project has been carried out by Trigital and Integral Distribution Synopsis (SDI). Pedro Escalona, ​​commercial director of Trigital, assures that "this is a job that fills us with satisfaction because we have participated from the pre-sale phase, contributing all our technical knowledge and extensive experience in the development of digitization and restoration workflows. We have fully equipped the facility with all the tools that Cherry Towers needs to safeguard and maintain its great cinematographic heritage."

For his part, Juan Carlos Cañamares, commercial director of SDI, adds that "Cherry Towers is a client that has always been characterized by being a spearhead in audiovisual technology in our country. Years ago, when the sector was beginning to take its first steps in HD, we already supplied a similar system with which thousands of films that were shown by the different TV networks that broadcast part of the extensive catalog of this Spanish production company were telecinated and restored. Today, and with the step to 4K, Spanish cinema will be available in the highest quality.”