Da Vinci System's Revival Used By La Camera Ottica

A leading provider of colour enhancement and image restoration products used in post-production facilities worldwide, da Vinci Systems, has announced that La Camera Ottica, part of the Universitá degli Studi in Udine, Italy, is relying on the company's Revival, image restoration system to repair and preserve films and to train students in the craft.
Since 2004, La Camera Ottica has restored more than 200 feature films, documentaries and video preservation projects with regional, national and international significance. Its clients include renowned film collectors and significant Italian film archives. Currently, La Camera Ottica technicians are deploying Revival to restore a series of 1960s and 1970s-era films shot in 16mm by German director Edgar Reitz.
Francesca Chelu Delana, professor at La Camera Ottica, said: "Revival has consistently proven itself to be a huge help to us. When we are working with very old and badly damaged films, such as films from the silent era, we see great improvements. When working with more recent films, those that are not so badly damaged, we achieve near perfection. Revival succeeds in eliminating all defects without introducing artifacts of its own."
A La Camera Ottica, films are first cleaned by chemical means, then digitised on a film scanner for ingest to the Revival system. High-speed processing algorithms employed by Revival automate much of the restoration work while its interactive mode is used to fix individual frames as necessary. Splice damage, scene cut and cadence errors can also be reviewed and repaired interactively. Revival includes a colour module that performs RGB lift, gain and gamma adjustments and incorporates da Vinci's Oiwer Windows for secondary colour corrections.
Revival was designed for intuitive operation and so is an excellent teaching tool, helping La Camera Ottica fulfil its teaching mission, which is as important as its technical work. In a given year, the university facility trains an average of ten students to use the Revival system. La Camera Ottica offers courses in film and video restoration, as well as audiovisual production, within a Specialist Degree in Motion Picture Philology and Preservation. Students work on a variety of research and scholastic projects, as well as client projects, learning to restore films in multiple formats: 35 mm, 16 mm, 8 mm, Super 8 and 9.5 mm. More information about the da Vinci Revival image restoration system is available at: www.davsys.com.
The Camera Ottica film lab was founded in 2002 in Gorizia as part of the Universitá degli Studi in Udine (DAMS-Cinema), Italy.
(KMcA/JM)