OCN question regarding single splice, ab roll technique.

[mfan1986]

Hi guys,

When it comes to restoring a film the original camera negative, can the OCN either be in a single splice form, or AB roll form? These are the only 2 forms and there are no others? And is the AB roll form considered more expensive? I assumed most A-budget films are single splice but I may be wrong.

[Geoff D]

A surprising amount of A-budget films were A/B rolled, it depends on whether they had lots of fades and/or dissolves and whether the production wanted them to be opticals or encoded during printing. 16mm and 65mm were pretty much A/B’d by default.

A single-strand form of A/B printing called Auto Select was created by Technicolor. Both shots to be printed as a dissolve were cut into the negative back to back, and during printing they’d expose the first shot, rewind the taking stock, then expose the next shot. It wasn’t very common, but it was used on some 65mm shows like Lawrence of Arabia. (Though when RAH did the restoration in the late ‘80s he broke it up into a more conventional A/B rolled configuration.)

Then there’s Techniscope cutting, whereby an extra frame is left either side of every cut so as to hide the splices (2-perf giving you no room to hide the joins), in other words when the neg is printed (or indeed transferred to video) you have to make sure that these extra frames are not included.

[oddbox83]

The bonus of AB rolls is that we don't get a quality drop on dissolves and fades.

The downside is they have to be very careful to reference an IP or print to match the fades and dissolves, unless you end with stuff like the missing fade on 2001 4K (which I assume means the OCN was AB rolls or Auto Select).

It was used on TV shows sometimes as well - Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons were AB rolls, it mentions it in the restoration notes on the Network Blu-rays.

[Geoff D]

Yes, 2001 was A/B. There are several dissolves missing from the 4K transfer of GoldenEye.