RTS Award Nomination

We’ve been nominated for our first award!!

Time to celebrate and restor…ate?

Last Friday we found out we had officially been nominated for this year’s Yorkshire RTS Awards in the Professional Excellence: Drama & Comedy Post Production category for our work on Carry On Up The Khyber which we completed for BritBox.

It’s been a tough year so far as we’ve adapted to working remotely, but this news certainly lifted our spirits and was a fantastic start to the weekend!

The restoration we completed for Carry On Up The Khyber was the first of many 4K transfers we have been commissioned to undertake on behalf of BritBox. To our knowledge this is the first time that a restoration project has been submitted in this category to the RTS, and this is also the first time work of this nature has been performed outside of London in the UK, bringing a new specialism and capability to the region.

Although the team at ITV Content Delivery have been restoring footage from film for many years, this was the first time a film with such historical significance had come to us, and we really threw everything into the restoration to ensure that the highest quality end product possible was delivered to BritBox.

There was a great deal of work required to complete this project, using Digital Vision World’s Phoenix we were able to stabilise the image, remove dirt and scratches as well as manage grain within the image. You can read more about the restoration process on our dedicated blog here.

As a result of completing this work, BritBox commissioned the team to restore a number of other titles including Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps, Carry On Camping and Powell & Pressburger’s Ill Met By Moonlight (which has just been completed). Having the ability to perform this type of work in Yorkshire is a great contribution to the growing production community in Leeds, and we are working hard to attract customers from other areas of the country to restore footage on their behalf, which should allow further growth in the region.

At ITV Content Delivery, we truly believe that great restoration is where both art and science merge. The art to great restoration is in recognising the limitations of the original creators, never pushing the material too far so that it becomes altered or different to the creators intentions, but at the same time we’re using cutting edge technology to add detail and clarity to images that have been lost or in some cases never seen before.

The industry is at the start of a journey, where more and more platforms are offering content to audiences, and as such there has never been more variety to choose from. Restoring content incentivises audiences to watch older material, as well as making sure that older titles are available to be watched and enjoyed for generations to come, and that they can be watched in the format and resolution that does best justice to the product.

Obviously, having this capability in the North of England is fantastic, but another huge benefit is that we can now ensure that films and programmes from England’s rich history of programme making can be enjoyed in the highest possible quality, definition and clarity for years to come.

The award ceremony takes place on November 20th.

If you have any content that you think could benefit from restoration, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.