The Restoration of the Grateful Dead Movie

Preparing the picture track for theatrical release

By David O. Weissman

(Reprinted from www.montereymedia.com)

In December 2003 I got a call from David Lemieux, the archivist for the Grateful Dead. He told me that they had produced a feature film in the seventies and wanted me to help him restore it for a DVD release. The film, titled "The Grateful Dead Movie", was largely the brainchild of Jerry Garcia. It was designed to be a memento for the fans, documenting five days of concerts at Winterland in San Francisco in October 1974. The movie didn’t come out until 1977, when it had modest success. In the 80s the film came out on VHS home video and sold well among Dead Heads. Now, almost 30 years later, it seemed to us to have a much broader appeal - it was an entertaining document of the San Francisco psychedelic rock scene of the 60s and early 70s.

My stated task was to help produce a DVD, but to do that I had to take a crash course in film archaeology. I had to locate the best quality version of the film and restore it. Since my background is in documentary video, not film, I had a lot to learn. I needed help, so I assembled a team of Bay Area experts in archival film. I enlisted the services of a variety of local film companies, including American Zoetrope, Monaco Labs, Retina, and Video Arts, where I work. Gary Coates, a veteran film colorist, guided the re-mastering effort. David Lemieux, of Grateful Dead Productions, directed the search for the film and the production of the DVD. Frank Zamacona came on to produce several documentaries about the making of the film as well as a commentary track. Finally, we brought on board Robert Marty, a veteran film editor/sound engineer with restoration experience on projects like the re-release of the Star Wars Trilogy and Amadeus.

Our first step was to try to find the original camera negatives, shot on 16mm by a host of cinematographers led by David Myers (Myers previously worked on Woodstock  and THX-1138,  and recently passed away in Mill Valley at the age of 90). Unfortunately we only found some of the original film, not enough to re-construct the entire feature. Luckily, David Lemieux was able to find, in an old Hollywood film vault, the 35 mm intermediate film that was made directly from the A/B roll original. This film, technically known as a CRI (Color Reversal Intermediate), was in very good condition. Amazingly, after 28 years, the color had not faded and the picture was fairly clean looking.

With the CRI in hand, I went over to Monaco Labs, where each reel was carefully inspected and then cleaned with an ultrasonic process. This removed a lot of the built-in dirt on the film.

Next, the film went to veteran colorist Gary Coates, who re-inspected it at American Zoetrope, and then did a test transfer onto Digital Betacam videotape. Our team reviewed the test and concluded that this CRI would be suitable not only for DVD but for possible theatrical release. We logged the various picture glitches and categorized them. These included a few large vertical scratches, a lot of small white dirt splotches, and some green blobs, which film labs call “comets.”

Having thoroughly appraised the film, we moved ahead to final telecine. This involved transferring all 8 CRI reels to Sony High-Definition digital format at Retina, a company in San Francisco. Here Gary Coates was able to greatly improve the look of the original movie using a DaVinci color correction system. For example, Gary was sometimes able to add lighting on an otherwise dark concert stage. Existing color spotlights were enhanced. The opening seven-minute animation sequence, produced by Gary Gutierrez, jumped back to life; it now looked sharp, saturated, and as psychedelic as Jerry Garcia might have originally intended.

Now that we had the film transferred to high-def digital video, we needed to complete one more step: clean-up. Unfortunately we had just about run out of money and our DVD release date was looming large.

I snagged a short-term rental of a digital restoration system made by a Rhode Island company called MTI Film. We temporarily installed it at Video Arts in San Francisco. We had exactly 8 days to get the job done. Senior Editor Zac Pineda spent the first day learning the system. On the second day he went to work, painstakingly going over the film frame by frame. Luckily the MTI system removed most of the glitches in a semi-automated fashion. Here’s how it worked: Zac used a Photoshop-like selection tool to encircle the offending area, then after a few mouse clicks the dirt or scratch disappeared. Eighty hours later, the film was largely scrubbed clean. But before we could deliver the digitally restored film, we noticed a problematic sequence of dancing Dead Heads. In two places, a frame was almost obliterated. Zac took these shots into Video Arts’ Smoke effects editor, which was able to digitally reconstruct the missing frames. The Smoke analyzed intact frames before and after the bad ones, and synthesized new clean frames.

Now, finally, we were ready for both DVD and theatrical release.

David O. Weissman
Video Arts
San Francisco