Egypt's cinematic treasures come to life with the Cintel G3 HDR+ scanner

The audiovisual complex Egyptian Media Production City (EMPC) uses the Cintel G3 HDR+ scanner and DaVinci Resolve Studio software from Blackmagic Design to restore Egypt's film archive.

He Egyptian Ministry of Culture, which owns the original copies of hundreds of film and photographic treasures dating from the period between 1940 and the late 1990s, decided to trust EMPC to undertake a task of restoration, documentation and digitization of its rich cultural legacy. The initiative starts from Cinematographic Restoration Center (CRC), an organization created in 2018 and led by Nada Hossam Eldeen Farahat: "Cinema is a big part of Egyptian culture. However, time is running out to preserve this legacy. For decades, celluloid was the main recording medium, and many of those original negatives are now in poor condition and in the process of decaying," explains the director.

This process of digitization, which has been carried out since 2019 using the Cintel scanner from Blackmagic Design, faces a new phase thanks to the acquisition of a new device Cintel G3 HDR+, with which it is planned to restore more than 300 feature films. Farahat provides details of how this delicate process will unfold: "After the roll is inspected and manually repaired, the film is cleaned to remove dirt, fingerprints or dust. It is then digitized in real time and in 4K resolution using the Cintel scanner and the DaVinci Resolve Studio program, where we carry out our color grading, restoration and mastering work."

In parallel, the audio and number reader KeyKode It records high-quality sound information from the negative, synchronized with image processing. The capstan encoder automatically corrects jitter and jitter, even when the scanner speed varies. Additionally, KeyKode numbers identify each frame of the film, dramatically speeding up workflow during post-production.

Integration with DaVinci Resolve

For Farahat, the main advantage of Cintel compared to other similar solutions is its operation together with DaVinci Resolve, since “the information is automatically captured and imported from the program, which allows us to save considerable time.” Similarly, post-production software offers tools to automatically remove the dust and dirt, reduce the flicker, replace parts of the image intelligently and reduce the spatial and temporal noise.

Las 300 movies that are currently being restored include dramas, comedies and musicals, and were produced between 1941 y 1995. "Restoring them to their former glory will take three years. Then, some selected ones will be screened at film festivals, while others will be given a wider release so that moviegoers can enjoy them once again," concludes Farahat.