Fremont, CA – June 01, 2016 – Blackmagic Design announced today that Tokyo based film production house Mainichi Productions has installed Cintel Film Scanner.
As a leading film production house, Mainichi Productions has developed a wide range of businesses, from planning, production and sales of video software to program broadcasting and archive sales. The firm has a long history, from its founding in 1908 when Osaka Mainichi Shimbun launched its moving picture team and commenced producing and making news films. In 1955, the current Mainichi Productions was established.
The company owns many film properties, including the popular television series ‘Koushitsu Album’ (The Imperial Family Album), which is a long running series they have produced since 1959, and which the company owns a huge amount of film of. Mainichi Productions also produced the official documentary film of both the Tokyo Olympics in 1964 and the Japanese EXPO in 1970, and own the film archives from their work at those events.
Fujio Moritani, the producer of Mainichi Productions New Technology Group, explains the reason why the company installed Cintel Film Scanner. “It’s a huge cost to store all the film footage we had produced until now. Many people have requested the old footage we keep, and we have some of the footage already digitized. However, the resolutions of those files are either SD or HD. We’ve always looked for a solution to make that footage 4K files to deal with the demands we get. Then we found the Cintel Film Scanner as our solution to make high quality digital image from our film archive at a low cost.”
“I tried to convert an old 16mm film from 80 years ago onto the scanner the other day and found I could scan it without any problems. The Cintel Film Scanner is very easy to use and it surprised me how the film could be so easily and seamlessly scanned by just using it in combination with DaVinci Resolve Studio, which we had installed on an iMac.”
“We now live in an era that anyone can shoot footage easily, but back in the old days, people invested quite a bit of money and time to create these moments. There are many people who are aware of this type of archive footage, but they lack the ability to appreciate their true value. There is also significant cultural and heritage value in preserving this footage, but until now the cost has been out of reach to do on a mass scale. Now that we have an efficient tool like the Cintel Film Scanner, I am certain that there will be more opportunities to preserve and maintain these old film properties,” said Moritani.
The company has future plans to scan all the films that are stored in their warehouse. “We are now considering licensing and selling the digitalized content we scan. We also want to offer a film scanning business for those outside our own business,” said Moritani.