Frame comparison demonstrating stabilisation with camera pans, from http://www.scientific-media.de/showroom/metropolis

Those who haven’t yet had their fill of the story of the restoration of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis may be interested to check out the websites of two of the facilities companies involved.

Scientific|Media is a German digital media production company. On its Metropolis Showroom it demonstrate through short clips the work it has to do to the battered 16mm elements which had to be inserted digitally into the final version. Processes illustrated include stabilisation (OnePoint, MultiPoint, Cross-DeWarp and MotionFiltering/DeJitter), grain management, and the inserting of sequences such as letters and handwritten notes into German. It’s for the technical specialist, but you do get a clear sense of the huge challenges involved.

Secondly there is Alpha-Omega Digital, another German company, which undertook the overall digital restoration work, matching the new material to that which it produced for the Friedrich-Wilhelm-Murnau-Foundation in 2001. Their website reports on this and describes in detail the work that it undertook for the film’s 2001 restoration.

For the record, previous posts here on the Metropolis discovery are:

• Lost version of Metropolis discovered (the initial report)
• The Metropolis case (detailed history of the 16mm print’s discovery)
• Any more for Metropolis? (the discovery of a 9.5mm print)
• Metropolis in Berlin (announcement of the Berlin screening)
• The New Metropolis (the restoration’s Berlin premiere)