The mere fact that Kind Hearts and Coronets is amongst the list of films from the great Pinewood Studios archive vault that are being digitally re-mastered from the original 35mm prints makes this a great project. Also noticed the film cans in the piece below that are in this batch to be digitally re-mastered was Man Who Fell to Earth which makes it an even more needed effort.

Pinewood has an incredible film production history to go along with their current day film and television production efforts. Home to most of the 007 James Bond films along with many of the classic Carry On films, other classics filmed there were Black Narcissus, Fahrenheit 451, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, The Shining (ok, not so classic for this one), The Dark Knight and the next couple of upcoming Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows films.

BBC London’s Katharine Carpenter takes a look at this painstakingly long restoration process. In this report, you can see how every single frame of film is scanned into a computer which begins the process of digital restoration, ultimately taking approximately one month per film to complete.

Thankfully, this doesn’t remind me of time “someone” in the U.S. decided how great it would be if all the classic B&W films would be if they were colorized.

Restoration…absolutely mandatory. Colorizing…not so much.