 I love golf. It's just an expensive hobby. It is. I used to play a lot of golf back in high school because we lived on a golf course, but after 18 holes of golf and it took four and a half to five hours, I always look back at that and go, I could have been so much more productive with my life in those five hours. Then hitting a white ball into a hole. Why's it got to be white? Wow. Hey, welcome back to our stupid directions. You idiot. I'm Corbin. Yeah. You know that you're here because you're just as stupid as we is. You are. It's the girls. Put up. Put up. Put up. It's so cute. It's the official Twitter account. Don't show. And today I got something that Rick's probably going to really enjoy. Is it because we're really going to enjoy. So I don't know what it is from the Oscars. It is called the inactive faith saving the appoo trilogy. Was this the lifetime honorary thing that they gave to Satyajit Ray? This might have played during it, but I think this is about them saving those films. Oh, about the Academy. So Scorsese talking about this? I don't know. But saving the appoo trilogy. Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. No, no, no. So here's here's. Somebody told me there's no spoilers. So. Okay. That was my fear. Like this isn't going to give us anything away. I'm trying out really hard to believe right now. I'd say they should. Because I think it's about actually saving the film. Well, we're going to have to show footage from the film and talk about the film. Wasn't it silent? So it's like it's not going to give anything away, right? Isn't the film silent? No, I don't think it's silent. I just think there isn't a lot said. Well, if it does, we'll stop it. Okay. Here we go. I didn't know they did all this kind of stuff. Satyajit Ray preservation project really started with Ray receiving an honorary Oscar at the 64th Academy Awards. What? The producers and Ray together that telecast had a lot of difficulty in assembling the clip package. The prints they found were beat up, scratched, mangled, missing sections. So a coalition of the Academy and non-profit foundations started an effort to preserve Ray's films. Satyajit Ray? Have we been saying it wrong? Either we have or he is. It's probably us. Ray is one of the essential figures. He is one of the major international artists in the world. It's Ray. Ray, we filmed you as in a sort of special place, not only in his career because it was the start of his career and it's what launched him on the internet. That was the start of his career? But also because the films themselves were in such flammable condition. Just as people were starting to really commit themselves to preserving his masterpieces, as part of that work, there was a tragic fire at a lab in London called Henderson Film Lab. The result was that several vaults worth of main train or safety film were either completely destroyed or severely damaged, including the negatives to technology. Edges were melted, perforations were torn out of them, distorted, and sometimes whole sections refused together. And so those original pieces that came back from the fire seemed to be a total loss. But luckily the director of the Academy Film Archive asked for all of the film and even any film camps related to Rhys Films to be shipped from London to Los Angeles. Calling to have it sent to the Academy to be preserved and then not throwing it out despite the fact that it had been completely unusable is a kind of act of faith that says what this sometime will have the technology pass through the camera that those actors stood in front of, that that director caused to roll in the first place and caused to cut. And there was something sacred about that and it has to be preserved. They stayed there. They sat there on our shelves for 20 years and when we had this opportunity to do the digital restorations with criteria and that started us thinking is there anything left? Could we go back to them? This is a film that's been sitting at the archive for 20 years. The first thing we did is take them out of those smoking cans and find out what was left. Sometimes the results were pretty horrific. The first can that we opened should have made us close the cans and just say okay we can't use these because they were, the film literally looked like it was on fire. This is an example that an extremely charred film completely melted together. This was probably closest to a direct flame. It was brittle. It was dry. It was like, I don't know. Ends were peaking off. I have no idea. But you really couldn't pick it up without pulling apart your hand. I don't know what this is kind of a with a very high degree of confidence said yes we believe that we can non-destructively get it into a condition where we can scan it and do some tests was the imaginary trabata at the Chinatecabologna in Bologna. I kind of saw it as if you have really one shot at this and if you don't get it right you may damage it. You have and it may lose the ability to scan it ever again. We had to take out what was entirely burned. There were literally charred pieces, fused pieces and it was really sad but we had to know what we could save and what we were just leaving behind. When we had those pieces that could be saved we moved it right away to Italy. Their first step was to physically get the materials in shape. Makes me so freaking happy. They spent thousands of hours first rehydrating the reels so that they were less brittle and could be unrolled. How are people so smart? Without further damaging the image area. They decided to scan it, sprocket list which meant that it would be very unstable and they'd gain on the scanner. Then they would do a test where they would take out the bad perforations and the bad splices and put new ones in. So then it could go through a pin register which would make it much more stable. All of this work had to be done by hand frame by frame perforations by perforations. Every single splice had to be rebuilt. All of the tape had melted at a different rate from the underlying celluloid which caused other kinds of things to seize up. And in the end, about half of the film from the first two films, I would say 40% of the surviving original negative from all the control room and about 60% of the surviving original negative from our rehydrating film were usable. Once we had a full assembly then we started with six or seven months of straight on digital restoration work. We're very fortunate the criterion had a workflow to handle 4k restoration because it's an extremely expensive process. The 4k restoration of Indian features like this is almost unheard of to do it in an archival perspective. It was really a partnership with Criterion that allowed us to do that. There were color grading issues. There were stability issues. Yeah, that's the kind of thing you do for a feature that's going to get released, not archive. Different pieces of film to each other. Stealing information. Importantly. Parts of adjacent frames. By far the biggest job we've ever done. The most important thing we had to fix was that warping. Plastic doesn't warp in one way. Plastic kind of warps all over the place which means if you lay it flat after you've warped you end up with sort of a geometry issue. This was sort of a logistical nightmare for the computers to try to figure this out because there's no checkbox for fixing the geometry of the warp film here. But that doesn't exist. So you have to come up with the idea yourself. The most important piece of restoration equipment is never the computer, is never the sound frame we're using. It's the person who's running the software and it's that person's experience. Our principle when we undertake a restoration is we would rather see original damage than see evidence no fix. What you want to be shown on screen is something that feels like the best imaginable from that original negative. Yeah, show me a hair going up in the thing or a tear in the film. Wow. The way we look at movies, the way we watch movies has changed substantially over the course of cinema history. Modern audiences that are used to high-definition video and super clear, crisp, clean images. Dusts and dirt and scratches would be something potentially so distracting that it would actually take viewers out. A lot of failure aware. I was known for his narratives and he's a very famous filmmaker. But I think he's underappreciated as a visual storyteller. We've preserved these films at their full visual quality, the full impact of the images, not just the stories. I do believe that right now if you watch these films you probably will have a better viewing experience than you would have if you went to see the print in the 50s. The satisfaction of then seeing these films open six years after they first played in New York. A film reviewed and discovered by a whole new generation of film writers and cinephiles. That's what we all did it for in the first place. Over the past 20 years the Academy and its partners have been able to preserve 20 of our ice films. I'm very excited to move forward beyond the aputrilogy and see what other films we can get done this way and bring them back to our new audiences as well. So beautiful. Wow. Yeah I had the same thought of only 40% of the first film unless it's just the original. The original. So they have old copies of... Right. How did they used to play? 35 millimeters, 35 mils. Yeah so they had other one? Yeah my suspicion is they had copies which wouldn't be as clean as the originals especially when you're going from film. That was my question is if a bunch was lost how do we have a trilogy of set of all of it? And it must be they were talking about the originals. Okay. The original film. That's my supposition. Yeah. But it does it gets me emotional to think of two things. To think of them doing this for this film and for this legend and this master of film to and you know granted we know this by word of mouth we know this by the academy giving him an honorary Oscar and we know this from the brilliance of just that one short film too. We're going to watch this soon. Yeah we're going to watch the trilogy and I want to see everything of his in the middle of... I paused and I'm going to start up again on my trip. I'm going to be reading more of his book because partly because I know a frame of reference it would help if you've seen his films in reading the book I'm reading. Uh-huh. But is he in here at all? Or is it because he's in a Hollywood? No I can't imagine that he is not in that book. Well because I didn't know because he's he's a... He's Bengali. Bengali. Yeah. So I don't know if it doesn't count because it's not Bollywood specific? I can't imagine it's not in there you can look through the contents but my two things are the thought of them restoring his work and what that would mean to him. Yeah. But I'm also aware of how many cinematographers and directors specifically directors who don't have the kind of status whose work is lost that we'll never see again. You know? Yeah. And a really beautiful... One of my favorite films if you haven't seen this film is the film Hugo by Martin Scorsese and that film is really for me a picture of what film and cinema means to Scorsese's heart because at the center of this the story is about a movie maker and it's just I'm ready to revisit that film as we approach the holidays right now. Hugo for me is just a beautiful movie about love for film and watching this gets me emotional to think about the lengths that people go to and it was it was an act of faith. Someone... Why would you otherwise look at that and not think to yourself this is this damage, toss it. Yeah. Burn in a fire but somebody said at the very least let's save this and hang on to it because these are the originals even though they're damaged they're the originals but little did they know or maybe they did it by faith thinking maybe one day we will have the technology to save this which is amazing. It's amazing that there's people that's smart out there that can do this kind of stuff. Yeah. They're not watching this channel that's for sure. But but also this was until 15. Yeah and the amount of money they pointed out the kind of money that needs to be done just in the digital retouching not just the restoration of the original 35 millimeter but the digital retouching for for just archival footage not something that you're 4k digital retouching that you're not going to do as a major release necessarily and that's if you don't know that about Martin Scorsese he has been an instrumental part in this movement to preserve film not even film that was originally damaged but just the recognition that anything shot on film as a physical medium is going to decay in the same way that they've tried to preserve literature and and put it like you know the Dead Sea Scrolls those things are under certain ultraviolet kind of protections because just the laws of physics make it atrophy and go away and there's a lot of film that didn't get damaged but it's being damaged by just the elements and Scorsese's big on getting all of that information that was on physical film put into digital format so that we don't ever lose it I love film preservations a beautiful thing yeah beautiful thing also please let us know is it rye or is it rye it's gotta be Satjajit rye and you know why I say that because that's how Indrani pronounces it oh okay and she's been golly so it's gotta be Satjajit rye Satjajit rye yes it was right they said rye and then they're like rye yeah well he's the only guy I've ever heard calling it rye yeah so maybe he's had a lot of rye bread recently but it was a really actually good video great video and no spoilers no spoilers