ONLINE EXCLUSIVE
How the West Was One:
Re-Creating the Three-Panel Cinerama Experience for the Small Screen
By Michael Kunkes
They say everything comes in threes. On September 9, Warner Home Video releases three home entertainment packages—a high-definition Blu-ray and two standard-definition boxed sets––of the restored How the West Was Won, MGM’s 1962 all-star Western epic that was one of only two narrative features shot entirely in the original Cinerama three-panel widescreen process (The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm was the other). The film won three Academy Awards––Best Screenplay (James R. Webb), Best Sound (Franklin Milton) and Best Editing Harold F. Kress)––and had three directors: George Marshall, Henry Hathaway and John Ford.
 A scene from the restored How the West Was Won. Courtesy of Warner Bros. MPI |
The Blu-ray package contains two newly re-mastered HD versions. The first uses the 3-D “Smilebox” technology developed by documentary filmmaker and Cinerama expert David Strohmaier that essentially uses a 3-D software system to bend the edges of the film to virtually recreate on the home screen the unique curvature of the synchronized three-projector Cinerama experience. The second is a wide-screen flat 2.89:1 version that was designed to capture the essence of the original 35mm Cinerama “road show” version, which attempted at the time (with only partial success) to optically join the three panels to form a 2.59:1 widescreen image. The 2.89 1 ratio is by far the largest viewing ratio ever created for a motion picture, the idea being to create a letterbox so large that all potential problems could be dealt with as one huge canvas.
 "Smilebox" technology uses a 3-D software system to bend the edges of the film to virtually recreate on the home screen the unique curvature of the synchronized three-projector Cinerama experience. Courtesy of Warner Bros. MPI |
“This is not a restoration in the true sense of the word,” says Ned Price, vice president of Mastering for Warner Bros. Technical Operations, who has dual responsibilities—prioritizing, maintaining and restoring the library as well as preparing distribution versions. “This is a re-interpretation of the curved Cinerama image for a flat screen; I don’t refer to this as a restoration because we visually altered the original film.”
The team at Warner Bros. Motion Picture Imaging (MPI), supervised by vice president of Engineering, WB Technical Operations Bill Baggelaar, was faced with numerous challenges and had two main goals—to minimize, if not eliminate, the join lines caused by the splitting of the three panels, and to correct geometric and parallax problems caused by depriving Cinerama of its curved screen and projecting it flat. The splits were most noticeable when there was horizontal movement from panel to panel, or in shots where correcting the geometry across the splits proved especially challenging.
 A scene from the restored How the West Was Won. Courtesy of Warner Bros. MPI |
Some problems were mitigated by the fact that the three original Cinerama negatives that went to make up the 146-degree Cinerama field of vision were in remarkable shape, since so few prints were struck. It also helped that, due to the efforts of MGM’s Metrolab staff, the original flat 2:35 35mm road show version went some ways toward removing the join lines between the panels, despite the limits of the photochemical lab processes of 1962.
The basic workflow went like this: All of the three-strip Cinerama panels were scanned at 2K (along with about 20,000 VistaVision elements), to create a 6K horizontal master with a total storage load of over 10 terabytes, at least five times the normal amount of a normal Remastering or restoration. By the end of the project, 80 terabytes were consumed by all versions of intermediate and final elements. Those digital files were sent to Warner Bros. Motion Picture Imaging’s strategic partner Prasad Studios in Bangalore, where the image was morphed flat and the join lines stitched with the company’s own process.
 A scene from the restored How the West Was Won. Courtesy of Warner Bros. MPI |
MPI then received back 6K image files which then went to colorist Ray Grabowski where a lot of the real work of making the 2.89:1 version truly seamless was done, along with final cleaning fixes. Video mastering was completed and then 4K DCI (Digital Cinema Initiative specification) and film archival versions were made. In addition, the Smilebox version, using 6K color corrected images as the source, was rendered into the final image using 3-D software. Finally, the original seven-channel dub was re-channeled to 5.1 surround sound. The total process took nearly five months from start to finish.
 Warner Bros.' Ned Price, left, Katie Largay and Ray Grabowski. Courtesy of Warner Bros. MPI |
According to Baggelaar, “The panel lines in general were hardly noticeable once we had very good alignment and overlap between the panels. Later, the stitching software used at Prasad was able to resolve a good portion of that, but in many cases the lines had to be fixed by hand with digital paint processes, and Grabowski then did additional seam fixes with FilmLight’s Baselight Eight real-time 4K color correction system.”
Says Grabowski, “MPI did everything possible to make it all match––especially the geometry––but when it comes to matching the panels, color correction was the only way you could do it. The stitching process eliminated the seams, but did not give you a nice even picture or color all the away across.” Grabowski had to window each panel manually, scene by scene, to even out the colors. “Because there were three panels, each was slightly different in exposure––mainly because you had three cameras all pointed in different directions, sometimes with different aperture settings,” he continues. “I honestly don’t know how they managed to get it as close as they did in the original; it was like having to color-correct three different films.”
“What’s great about the Baselight system is that we were able to conform the individual panels and load those so that the match grading and color correction processes could begin while all the stitching, dirt and scratch removal was going on in another department,” adds assistant colorist Katie Largay, who was also largely responsible for the massive amount of data wrangling. “The benchmark for playback on this system was for 4K resolution with two layers of correction in real time, but the more twisting and windowing of the image we do, especially in 6K, makes it a lot more processor-intensive and playback tends to slow down, but the Baselight can pretty much handle anything we throw at it,” she says.
Among the most difficult scenes to work on were the Indian attack and buffalo stampede scenes (directed by Hathaway and Marshall, respectively), sequences that were originally shot in 65mm (with 35mm VistaVision reductions later created for video mastering and scanned in 6K), due to the limited mobility of the heavy Cinerama cameras. “When you have scenes with a lot of sky stretching across the frame, you have less ability to hide things,” Grabowski explains. “The seams are much more apparent and you have to deal with them the best you can. We do a lot of blending between panels and defocusing electronically to get rid of the hard edges and make them seem less apparent. The idea is to fool the eye into seeing one long sky shot all the way across the frame.
“Throughout the movie, you will notice trees and rocks placed in the seams to make them less noticeable,” he continues. “The filmmakers did that to help themselves out, because the limitations of the format meant that they had to keep their subjects within a single panel and could not compose for the full frame. That static camera made our job easier.”
Grabowski’s discerning eye is pretty happy with the final results. “I think it holds up very well and makes for a very compelling viewing experience in either the 2.89:1 version or the Smilebox. We aren't used to seeing such a wide picture, but there really is a lot of information, and we wanted to make sure that we showed as much as possible. It is definitely more impressive the larger it gets, but looks good in all of those situations.”
“Ray and Katie are among our unsung heroes, and Ray is incredibly good at understanding and interpreting a film’s style,” says Price, who adds that his restoration and preservation team is usually working on no less than 50 titles at any one time. Among the most interesting at the moment are a package of 50 Vitaphone shorts, Fleischer Studios early Popeye cartoons, a series of old Charlie Chan movies and a full 6K restoration of the 1954 version of A Star is Born.
“It’s not always about making the prettiest picture; it’s about understanding the filmmakers’ vision and then recreating that intent in a different color space,” Price concludes passionately. “At the very least, when the filmmakers are no longer with us, the goal becomes simply: ‘Do no harm.’”
Michael Kunkes is a freelance editor and writer specializing in animation, production and post-production. He can be reached at writermk@sbcglobal.net.