Afinal Filmes Uses Cintel Scanner for Restoration of Brazilian and Silent Hollywood Films
Fremont, CA – January 13, 2021 – Blackmagic Design today announced that Brazilian film restoration and post production facility Afinal Filmes has used the Cintel Scanner and DaVinci Resolve Studio to restore more than 60 feature films and digitize nearly 500 newsreels, including the 1968 Brazilian film “Como Vai, Vai Bem?” and 30 Hollywood silent films from the 1920s and 1930s.
Founded in 1998 by CEO Marcelo Pedrazzi, Afinal Filmes has played an integral role in the film restoration and post production industry in Brazil from its inception. Since incorporating a Cintel Scanner into its workflow in 2016, Afinal Filmes has strengthened the quality and speed of its film restoration and digitalization offerings.
Afinal Filmes’ latest major project includes the HDR restoration of the late 1960s black and white film, “Como Vai, Vai Bem?” The film, a comedy starring the late popular Brazilian actor Flávio Migliaccio, will be available on streaming services and in select theaters in early 2021. Afinal Filmes will also be producing and managing post production on a documentary about the life of Migliaccio to support the film. As part of the documentary, Afinal Filmes has included a collection of archive material from several of Migliaccio’s films that has also been restored using the Cintel Scanner.
“We didn’t have access to the negatives of the original ‘Como Vai, Vai Bem?’ film, making the restoration process slightly different than some of our other projects. We instead began the process by placing the film’s 35mm positives on the Cintel Scanner,” explained Pedrazzi. “The entire restoration process of ‘Como Vai, Vai Bem?’ only took about five weeks, which is quite fast.”
According to Pedrazzi, Afinal Filmes has found the Cintel Scanner to be extremely helpful, specifically when it comes perfecting stabilization. “The Cintel Scanner’s automatic stabilization feature has become a perfect tool for us. Even when we are digitalizing material at 24 fps, the Cintel Scanner has very impressive and steady stabilization. This has made our job much easier.”
After the film was scanned and ready for post production, Pedrazzi and the team relied on DaVinci Resolve Studio to clean some details on the film, including noise reduction, eliminating dust, and correcting the contrast of the black and white images.
“When you see old black and white films like ‘Como Vai, Vai Bem?’ in HDR, it brings the viewer to another world,” said Pedrazzi. “You can see all the details in the whites and the shadows are incredible.”
In addition to the “Como Vai, Vai Bem?” restoration project, Afinal Filmes recently received an archive of 500 reels of nitrate materials ranging from 1917 to 1940, found on a farm outside of Rio de Janeiro. As the team went through the film materials, they uncovered 30 silent Hollywood films from the 1920s and 1930s, including “Sinbad the Sailor,” “His New Mamma” and “The Fourth Alarm.” To save this rare content, Afinal Filmes is utilizing the Cintel Scanner to digitize the films and then archive them for possible future use. Afinal Filmes hopes to provide this content to a library or museum in the future for preservation.
Along with the Cintel Scanner and DaVinci Resolve Studio, Afinal Filmes also uses a variety of Blackmagic Design gear in its facility, including DeckLink 4K Extreme, DeckLink 4K Extreme 12G and DeckLink Studio 4K capture and playback cards, Blackmagic Audio Monitor 12G, SmartScope Duo 4K and SmartView 4K monitors, Smart Videohub 20×20 routers, Teranex standards converters, and several Mini Converters SDI to HDMI 6G. This equipment together makes up an input room for Afinal Filmes to digitize a variety of archive tapes and make conversions, such as SD tapes to HD files.
“The Cintel Scanner, paired with DaVinci Resolve Studio, has proved to be an extremely reliable piece of our workflow at Afinal Filmes,” concluded Pedrazzi. “It’s always a rewarding experience restoring films, and the Cintel Scanner makes the process seamless.”
Press Photography
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About Blackmagic Design
Blackmagic Design creates the world’s highest quality video editing products, digital film cameras, color correctors, video converters, video monitoring, routers, live production switchers, disk recorders, waveform monitors and real time film scanners for the feature film, post production and television broadcast industries. Blackmagic Design’s DeckLink capture cards launched a revolution in quality and affordability in post production, while the company’s Emmy™ award winning DaVinci color correction products have dominated the television and film industry since 1984. Blackmagic Design continues ground breaking innovations including 6G-SDI and 12G-SDI products and stereoscopic 3D and Ultra HD workflows. Founded by world leading post production editors and engineers, Blackmagic Design has offices in the USA, UK, Japan, Singapore and Australia. For more information, please go to www.blackmagicdesign.com.