The Sound of Music in 8K
March 30, 2015
By Chris Forrester
Last week’s special VIP 50th Anniversary screening of The Sound of Music was shown in a ‘better than original’ version thanks to digital remastering of an earlier 2000 photochemical restoration.
But this time around the remastering, which took place at Burbank’s FotoKem post-production house, the technicians used modern colour-grading tools to help cure flicker and obvious glitches in the original material. For example, colorist Mark Griffith told The Hollywood Reporter’s Carolyn Giardina, that in a key scene when Maria meets the children for the first time the walls changed colour from shot to shot.
The FotoKem team were able to cure this problem and dozens of others by creating new 65mm intermediate film components, and these were digitised at 8K resolution (16 times the resolution of HDTV) which was completely digitally graded, and then remastered down to 4K.
The restored multiple Academy Award-winning musical will be show in some 500 cinemas in the USA between April 19th-22nd, and the new master was used to create a 5-disc 50th Anniversary ‘Ultimate Collector’s Edition’ BluRay, and new versions on DVD from 21st Century Fox.