The gang here at WaveGuide Studios did a spectacular job restoring Techne Films' award-winning short, "Four Episodes from 1984," and bringing it to 1080p Blu-ray. The film, shot in 35mm but produced for around $5,000 in the early 1980s, had never been released in HD.
The picture, when the original print was transferred to HD, revealed the age of the Arriflex 35 IIB camera used to photograph the film, and showed a lot of registration jitter. There were also a lot of scratches and embedded dust particles. The WaveGuide team painstakingly addressed the problems, partly with automated tools, but mostly by painstakingly working with each of the 41,600 individual frames in the film.
The original monaural sound mix suffered from both technological and budgetary limitations. Todd Watson, our audio producer/engineer, scrapped the audio track and created an all-new 96kHz stereo mix, going all the way back to the original field tapes and cleaning up dialog and sound effects, recording additional foleys and sound effects and creating an all-new, immersive sound design.
The team also produced a director's commentary track and two bonus featurettes - an interview with Watson about the audio restoration, and a slide show about the production, using production stills and memorabilia from the producers' archives.
Finally, the Blu-ray mastering was performed in-house at WaveGuide Studios by our digital media team.
