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Proof: The Road to Restoration
A National Film and Sound Archive Report.

by Gayle Lake

The digital restoration of Proof premiered at the Melbourne International Film Festival
on 29 Jul 2016. It’s been a long road, but it was absolutely worth it!
The work begins

One of the Proof film cans.
There was a lot of work before that glamorous red carpet moment. It all began with an
extensive period of investigation of the Proof materials in the NFSA collection.
A number of our experts – curators, audiovisual conservators and technicians – worked
together to determine which components would be the best source masters for the
digital restoration. They had to wind the 25-year-old film reels through to look for
decomposition, shrinkage, perforation damage and scratches.
This work can be very time consuming if extensive repair work is needed, such as fixing
splices and sprocket damage on the film. This is very important, as the materials chosen
for restoration must be able to cope with the telecine and scanning processes.
We were soon able to confirm that all components were complete and belonged to the
same version. We decided that the original picture negative (the negative that actually
ran through film camera when the film was shot) would give us the best picture result,
so we had it ultrasonically cleaned and telecined.
At the same time, we conducted an analysis of the sound, and selected the DME
(Dialogue, Music and Effects) 35 mm component. It was digitised and the resulting files
were then de-noised to reduce a low but audible hum. The clicks, pops and dropouts

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