S3E01 - Film Preservation and Home Video with Blake Blasingame

Welcome to season 3! To kick things off, we’ve brought Duplitech Film Services Manager Blake Blasingame in to discuss film preservation and mastering for home video. Are you ready for 88 minutes of unadulterated shop talk about grain structure, bit depth, oversampling, color grading, and vinegar syndrome? Of course you are! This is Film Formally, after all.

In this episode, we discuss:
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The process of preserving and restoring films for Blu-Ray and DVD releases.

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Scan resolutions - 4k, and the value of oversampling.

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Vinegar syndrome: the silent killer.

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How film elements are sourced for scans - negatives, IPs, IBs, and release prints.

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Robert Richardson and revisionism.

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William Peter Blatty and the restoration of the lost Legion cut of The Exorcist III

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More audio restoration!

If you’d like to support the show, here’s a link to our Patreon (patreon.com/filmformally).

Additional Resources:
Works discussed during this episode:

Snow Falling on Cedars

The Exorcist III / Legion

The Thing

The French Connection

The Big Lebowski

Blade Runner 2049

Mad Max: Fury Road

The Heartbreak Kid

Playtime

Tree of Wooden Clogs

Army of Shadows

Ran

The works of Wong Kar-Wai