The Hindu Business Line : Movie tones

Over several creative decades, Indian cinema has given audiences across the country an impressive collection of movie classics, lilting tunes and soulful music.

Viewed time and again over the years, these masterpieces in various Indian languages have an enduring popularity. However, decaying prints and other damage such as fungus or pinholes threaten their very existence.

Many of these masterpieces are in black-and-white and today’s technology makes it possible to give them the right touch of colour and an extended life.

It is possible also to recreate audio portions, be it instrumental music or voice, and mix it with the original soundtracks.

A pioneering experiment in this direction was the colourisation of one of Indian cinema’s all-time greats, Mughal-e-Azam, by a Canadian company in 1999-2000. It took nearly three-and-a-half years of painstaking work to salvage the decaying black-and-white prints and bring the classic to theatres in its new colour avatar.

Restoration craft

There are several classics in Indian cinema with original prints in different stages of deterioration. While commendable effort has gone in to preserve them over the decades, the quality of print is bound to falter over time, says C. Jagan Mohan, who heads the digital cinema business unit of Hyderabad-based Goldstone Technologies. His team of over 75 professionals is working hard to restore and light up the quality and colour of several movie classics. The company has also struck a technology deal with the California-based Legend Films for a new software based on artificial intelligence which cuts down on time in the colourisation and restoration process. Legend Films has already demonstrated the software for at least 70 Hollywood movies, but mostly in the DVD format.

Upbeat on the business potential, Mohan says, “In the coloured version of Mughal-e-Azam, which was limited to 64 frames, only a few colours (blue for example) were used for background. However, we are using thousands of colours to give moviegoers a new experience. We can do a Mughal-e-Azam in 15 days with our technology.”

Apart from Hum Dono in Hindi, Goldstone has bought rights for several black-and-white classics in Telugu and Tamil and is in talks with Malayalam producers. The active colourisation projects under way include legendary Kannada hero Raj Kumar’s Satya Harischandra and one of the finest Telugu movies, Sri Krishna Arjuna Yuddham (1963), which saw the rare appearance of actors N.T. Rama Rao and Akkineni Nageswara Rao together in it.

Compared to the two long years it took to colourise Naya Daur, Dev Anand’s classic Hum Dono will be colourised in just four months at Goldstone, says Mohan.

Each colourisation project costs about Rs 2 crore. To bring in cinematic effects, the soundtracks need to be converted to six-channel audio, as the old films are on mono sound system. The entire soundtrack, including the original dialogue, has to be redone in contemporary Dolby 6.1 ‘Surround Sound’ format.

Revenue models

Goldstone is exploring different revenue models for the business. For Hindi films, it wants to go for revenue sharing as this is projected to be a big market. For instance, in the case of Hum Dono, the company charged Rs 3.5 crore and bagged a 25-year, 50:50 revenue-sharing arrangement. In the case of Telugu films, the company has bought outright rights for the original prints and in Kannada, it provides technology services, says D.P. Sreenivas, Executive Director.

Interestingly, the colourised movie will have to get a censor certificate for theatre audiences. In future, Goldstone proposes to offer the coloured versions in DVD, IPTV and satellite TV formats.

Are audiences ready?

Mughal-e-Azam was released with great fanfare. Invitations to the event were designed to look like royal scrolls, and the film cans were brought to the Mumbai theatre on the back of a caparisoned elephant.

While Legend, Goldstone and some other new entrants are exuding confidence that the coloured remakes will attract audiences and bring in the revenues, a peek into recent history reveals some not-so-encouraging results. Media biggie Ted Turner, who owned the MGM/UA library of classics, had proposed to colourise all the classics for his TNT cable TV channel in the 1980s. His idea met with resistance from famous Hollywood personalities such as Frank Capra, Billy Wilder and Woody Allen, who belonged to the Screen Actors Guild and Director’s Guild, and who were averse to tinkering with the originals.

Turner’s company did produce the colourised version of Casablanca in 1988, but there were no further attempts and the idea slowly fizzled out.

Companies such as Goldstone are tempting today’s viewers with the chance to watch their favourite evergreen hits colourised on a wide format (earlier films were made in 35 mm), either in a movie theatre or in the comfort of one’s home.

Colours of stardom

Hyderabad-based Goldstone Technologies has tied up with US-based Legend Films for its advanced colourisation software.

“The technology is based on pattern recognition and is focused on 16-bit files at 2k resolution, 65,000 shades of grey scales on each of three channels,” says C. Jagan Mohan of Goldstone Technologies.

Goldstone can convert a fully edited song sequence of, say, a 25-year-old colour movie into black and white and colourise it according to specification. This is called re-colourisation and restoration.

For the backgrounds it uses a different software tool. Only the characters are coloured. Here too the colour is not imposed on the characters, but rather a mask is created keeping in mind the skin tones, lighting conditions, the movement of the characters and the background, Mohan explains.

For more minute details, the software is applied to a single negative frame by the visualisers. The software quickly scans the contrasts — extreme brightness, defects and so on. These defects can then be selected and cleared. The task is repeated on each of the frames. Interestingly, the tool is capable of identifying the defects and comparing them with the previous and subsequent frames to ensure the right colour combinations.

The team requires painters, graphic artists and expert visualisers who can finalise the most appropriate colours, Mohan says.

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