Film Chest has chosen a Digital Vision Golden Eye III film scanner and Phoenix restoration software to power their expanded pipeline for television and motion picture restoration and distribution. The systems were installed earlier this year in Film Chest’s Bridgeport Connecticut facility. Film Chest owns and distributes thousands of titles boasting one of the largest libraries of classic movies and television series’ in the world. They provide content to pay cable public and broadcast television motion pictures streaming distribution and a variety of other professional uses. Their collection is also notable for its archive of orphan films and family collections. Film Chest delivers to networks studios and the growing array of outlets including Hulu Netflix Turner Classic Movies and American Movie Classics Amazon iTunes Verizon FiOs and Vudu as well as servicing other libraries. Given the nature of the projects they work on and the condition of the elements it was crucial that they develop a high-quality solution to their restoration needs. Phil Hopkins founder and president of Film Chest said “We were committed to building an in-house facility to create the highest quality elements possible not just for our projects but for the libraries that we manage on behalf of a number of content holders. In the midst of all of our extensive work we realized that it was simply inefficient to send negatives away for scanning. After we investigated all of our options we found that the Golden Eye III and Phoenix offered us an amazing solution from scan to final with great Digital Vision support and hardware and software integration.” After quality output became the top priority for the Film Chest team. Hopkins continued “With 200 features to do each year we had to have a high degree of accuracy and efficiency. Beginning the process with Golden Eye III and going thru the process of Phoenix is an extremely proficient model. In the near future when the integration of metadata is complete we will be incredibly efficient in our service.” “The Strange Love of Martha Ivers is a perfect example of a problematic film ” he said. “The print belongs to the Library of Congress and we were working with them towards a Blu-ray release of the film. We asked The Library to make a transfer but when we began to work on the restored master they sent the film was shrunken and destabilized. I spoke with the head curator and they agreed to send us the original film elements which is an extremely rare occurrence. The Golden Eye III transfer was absolutely as good as it could be and the restoration was much better than it would have been on its own.” He said “We must have a powerful ability to work with problem films from S8 to 16 to old 35 we need to make the very best elements possible. We manage a complex and frequently problematic library. This pipeline has given us an arsenal of tools that help us create beautiful and lasting projects. We couldn’t be happier with the Golden Eye III and the Phoenix.” Kelvin Bolah president of Digital Vision said “The Film Chest team have been very thorough in the evaluation of our technology and competitive solutions. They are a very impressive group of people and based on their in-depth knowledge and due diligence they have chosen to work with what they consider to be the best tools in the market. Their stringent processes gives total validation to the efforts of our strong product management and R&D teams. We wish Film Chest undoubted success as they continue to grow and develop their business.”
