Published Wednesday 11 October 2023 by Mark Brindle in Post Production

Cannibal! The Musical Restoration for Blu-ray Release Begins

We have started the post-production work on Trey Parker (of Southpark fame) comedy-horror film Cannibal! The Musical from 1993 - trying to create an amazing HD version at 24p for release on Blu-ray disc for Liam Regan of Refuse Films. The Blu-ray is scheduled for release in 2024 and will feature the main comedy musical by Trey Parker (himself playing Alfred Packer the Cannibal) along with a vast array of extra features, commentary tracks, raw behind the scenes footage and a ton of related content from the Troma Films archive.

Cannibal! The Musical title screen after restoration

The original 16mm film was lost long ago and so all that remains are several digibeta tapes of the film as masters in the Troma archive, these are encoded at 29.97 for NTSC Television broadcast. We have to convert the master films back to its original 24p and then upscale it to HD, clean up some of the noise and dust and dirt and scratches that are baked in on the original transfer and massage it onto a Blu-ray release.

We have started the conversion process and tested using our Blackmagic Teranex converters verses direct digital conversion in Davinci Resolve. Despite the loss of the original film, it was scanned and edited digitally the first time. This has meant we can remove the extra padding (pulldown) frames that were added for NTSC broadcast and recover the original 24p frames using a pull-down removal technique. The only issue is that the cadence is different on each shot, and so we have to manually check the cadence of the pulldown removal on each shot to remove the interlacing effects. Mark is enjoying going through the film and sorting this out!

Cannibal The Musical going through some post processing to remove the extra pulldown frames

The next stage of the process is to fix up any issues on shot transitions that are not straight cuts (fades/wipes etc) and any text and graphic overlays that still have combing/interlacing artifacts left in there. Another job for Mark. Once we have a clean 24p master, we can start to remove some of the dust and dirt and scratches and remove some of the noise, look at colour balance of the original grade and then start on the upscale process.

Watch the brief 'before and after' VFX reel on the link above to see what some of the original Standard def footage looked like before we restored it to 244p and cleaned it up for Blu-ray.

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