Restoring Hammer's 1958 Dracula for 4K Blu-ray took 2,000 frames of hair removal and days of work for 90 seconds
TechRadar visited Silver Salt Restoration to see the 4K Blu-ray remaster of Hammer's 1958 film Dracula. The team told TechRadar how they digitally removed 2,000 frames of a single hair and corrected yellow staining and colour fade.
Paul Gowlett, the project lead for Hammer at Silver Salt Restoration, demonstrated the removal of the hair, visible at the bottom of the frame in the film's opening sequence showing the exterior of the castle among tombstones. Gowlett told TechRadar that the hair was part of the original presentation of the film but came from a production issue with cleaning the camera gate, and was not intentional. Each frame was repaired digitally by pulling information from later frames in the same shot.
Anthony Badger, head of restoration at Silver Salt, said in an earlier conversation with TechRadar that deciding how much to intervene can be an ethical dilemma, but that the team must consider whether an extreme problem will take viewers out of the story. TechRadar reported that the hair was part of the original film but could serve as a distraction.
The team also found heavy yellow staining in the digital files, which was apparent only when isolating the blue channel of the image, and worked to de-flicker the footage so colours remained stable. TechRadar previously described the earlier stages of restoration, including table inspection, cleaning and scanning, after which DPX files are passed to restoration artists who remove dirt and tidy film grain on each individual frame.
Once restoration is complete, the files go to grading. Dracula is being graded by Ray King, head of film at Silver Salt, with oversight from Mark Stanborough, head of restoration at Hammer Films. TechRadar reported that Peter Cushing's skin tone took on a red tint after the HDR grade, which King attributed to the old stage makeup being picked up during grading; after adjustment, the result appeared natural and lifelike. For the opening title sequence, King separated the picture and the blood-red 'Dracula' lettering into two layers so the words could be graded back to a colour worthy of them. The original scanned elements had suffered colour fade, and the HDR remaster revived colours that, according to TechRadar, were not popping as much in the source.