Original House Of Cards Trilogy Remastered For Blu-Ray

BBC Studios and Post Production’s Digital Media Services team has remastered the iconic BBC political drama trilogy, House of Cards, for a North American Blu-ray release by BBC Worldwide Americas.
The remaster was commissioned to coincide with the exclusive airing of the new series staring Kevin Spacey on Netflix.
First aired on the BBC in late 1990, the House of Cards trilogy ran for 12 episodes over three series – House of Cards, To Play the King and The Final Cut. They charted the rise and ultimate demise of the ruthlessly ambitious and devious politician, Francis Urquhart (played by Ian Richardson).
Working to a five-week turnaround deadline, BBC Studios and Post Production’s Digital Media Services team worked closely with BBC Worldwide Americas to identify the best quality 16mm A/B negative source material available. To achieve the optimum results in high definition, the team scanned the film into its SCANITY film scanner and conformed and graded the footage in Nucoda Film Master, as well as removing grain and dust. All three series were then manually cleaned-up using Diamant Dustbust and some scuffs and film tears that had appeared on some of the reels of footage from the third series were carefully corrected.
The title sequence featuring aerial footage of the Houses of Parliament had originally been shot on 35mm film. This material was sourced and treated as separate elements to ensure the best possible end result. All the captions and credits were remade in HD after the original style and typography was identified to ensure its authenticity.
The final process was to convert the frame rate to 23.98fps for the North American market, and the completed ProRes HD files were delivered to BBC Worldwide Americas via an Aspera high-speed file transfer.
Jonathan Wood, Colourist at BBC Studios and Post Production, who led the project, said: "We’re proud to have remastered the original House of Cards trilogy for a new audience to enjoy. Using SCANITY and other technologies we were able to overcome challenges with some of the source material to ensure that the final remaster is of picture perfect quality."
www.bbcstudiosandpostproduction.com