Pinewood Studios launches film restoration facility

Pinewood’s media preservation, restoration and archive facility open for business

Pinewood Studios has launched its Media Preservation, Restoration and Archive facility with a reception attended by key industry figures from companies including Optimum Releasing, Canal+, Disney, Getty Images, and Warner Bros and the BBC.

Located in Pinewood’s Picture Post Production suite, the new facilities will provide restoration services for still and moving images.

Pinewood announced a deal last year with Optimum Releasing and Canal+ relating to the Canal+ British Library Archive which comprises some 1,400 classic British films including early Hitchcock, The Third Man, The Ladykillers, The Dambusters and many other titles from iconic names like Ealing, Carry On and Hammer.

As part of the deal, Pinewood will provide a large amount of the film and audio preservation and restoration services for the film archive, which has been based at Pinewood Studios for the past twenty years.

Pinewood will start with restorations of three classic titles—Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom, Robert Hamer’s Kind Hearts and Coronets and Lionel Jeffries’ The Railway Children, each of which will be subsequently re-released theatrically and made available in Bluray/DVD. Pinewood will also complete the planned digitisation of the Canal+ Image UK Ltd stills archive.

Working in conjunction with Optimum Releasing and Canal+, Pinewood Post Production will provide managed, secure temperature and humidity controlled storage for the Canal+ Image UK library assets and has constructed two new, state of the art cold storage facilities to manage this process.

Speaking at the launch, Giles Farley, co-Managing Director of Pinewood Group Post Production said: “We are delighted to have offically opened the new facilities and are immensely pleased to have been joined by so many colleagues from across the film and television industry. Everyone present here today shares our passion for preserving iconic and historical film titles and still images. We are especially proud that our new state of the art facilities allow us to work with Canal+ to restore many classic British titles.”

Point your browsers to the CommanderBond.net main page and our Discussion Forums for all the latest James Bond 007 news.