© Copyright Clive Young
From DVDWorks, June, 2001.SAVING CARL SAGAN'S COSMOS
Landmark PBS Series Goes Through DVD EvolutionBy Clive Young
When Cosmos first debuted in 1980, the reaction was instantaneous; across the U.S., PBS stations scored record ratings as millions flocked to the unlikely TV series that freely mixed science with spirituality, examining evolution, the history of science and human existence itself. The 13 episodes created a pop culture phenomenon, spinning off books, soundtracks and more as a public exhausted by the vapid Seventies instantly latched on to Dr. Carl Sagan's thoughtful, intimate take on man's place in the universe.
Conceived and hosted by Sagan, a Pulitzer-prize winning author and director of the Laboratory for Planetary Studies at Cornell University, Cosmos dragged science out of the classroom and into real life, using a then-revolutionary mix of on-location segments shot around the world, cutting edge special effects, computer graphics, historical recreations and more to explain intricate, often abstract concepts to the average person. Two decades later, more than 600 million people have seen Cosmos since it first aired--but just over a year ago, the series was on the verge of extinction.
More than 600 million people have seen Cosmos, but just over a year ago, the series was on the verge of extinction. Turner Home Entertainment purchased Cosmos from series producer KCET in 1989. In making the move to commercial television, the hour-long episodes were edited down to shorter lengths, and Sagan shot a number of brief science updates to be used as epilogues. Additionally, a 14th episode with Ted Turner interviewing Sagan was produced, and this "new" version of the series was eventually released as a VHS box set.
Sagan died at the age of 62 in December, 1996, after a two-year battle with bone marrow cancer. Carrying on his legacy, however, Sagan's Cosmos co-writer (and widow) Ann Druyan teamed with the series' original sound designer, Kent Gibson, in 1999 to create Cosmos Studios. The company, they decided, would introduce the series to a new generation by re-releasing it on VHS and DVD in time for the 2000 holiday buying season. After that, the company would produce new TV specials under the Cosmos banner.
Cosmos Studios purchased the original 13 episodes back from Turner in early 2000, and soon began taking bids from DVD compression and authoring facilities. Whether it was coincidence or a twist of fate is hard to say, but the production of Cosmos came around full-circle at last year's NAB Convention in Las Vegas, when Gibson turned a corner on the show floor and ran into Steve Wyskocil.
Wyskocil had been part of the original show's production team, working variously as a production assistant, show AD, stage manager and studio production coordinator. In the years that followed, he joined Varitel Video in Los Angeles as a vice president, and founded that company's video restoration division. Eventually EDS Digital Studios purchased Varitel and Wyskocil became its president, creating a new digital film restoration division in 1997. Clients included the likes of Disney, as EDS' artists used Quantel Domino machines to "paint out" dirt and scratches, restoring the negatives to numerous classic animated films (The resulting masters are still being used by Disney in down-resed form for its various animated VHS and DVD releases).
However, Wyskocil struck out on his own in 1999, founding Still In Motion, LLC. (Los Angeles), a DVD compression and authoring facility; it wasn't long after that he and Gibson were suddenly reacquainted on the floor of the NAB show.
"He said, 'I'm the president of Cosmos Studios now; we're going to re-release the show on DVD,' so I started reaching for my business card and said, 'You have to let us do it!,'" Wyskocil recalled, laughing. "At the time, we were looking for a project that we could sink our teeth into, and he needed someone he could trust. He looked at me and said, 'I remember you had a restoration division when you ran the other company. Can you still do that?' I said, 'Yes, why?'"
OPERATION: RESTORATION
It turned out that although Cosmos Studios had purchased the show from Turner, no one knew what shape it was in or how it had been stored. As Still In Motion quickly negotiated to handle compression, authoring and any restoration the series might need, 200 boxes of material began to arrive from various Turner vaults around the country. Much of it included the original 16mm location footage and 35mm visual effects footage shot in 1978 and 1979, 1-inch videotape reels of TV studio material, audio stems, and numerous versions of episode tapes in various stages of age and labeling. In short, it was a disaster.After the hundreds of boxes were cataloged, they discovered that only a few of the original edited master tapes from the late Seventies had survived, and that a number of elements were still missing. "We conducted a search to get more elements in, and then started to piece together the 13 episodes from the best sources we could find," said Wyskocil.
The team hoped to go back to the original film reels and re-transfer them, but most of the original films had faded, the prints and negatives had turned magenta, and the camera masters had been seriously damaged. The films had been stored on cores inside paper bags in paper boxes; as the bags aged, they began to disintegrate into tiny grains of paper, which had gotten in the reels. Somewhere along the line, the films had been wound too tight, and the grains created millions of tiny white scratches.
"When you project it, it looks like a snow storm of little, tiny scratches," said Wyskocil. "We did tests with it and just through storage problems and fading, almost none of the film was usable. We knew then that it had to be a videotape restoration process."
That meant more digging as they sorted through dozens of tapes: "Some of them were original, edited master tapes from KCET in 1980; some were dubs made around 1983; and others were the 1989 edits that Turner did." In all, there were up to six different versions of each episode, between mono, stereo and international versions of the various 1980 and 1989 editions; to add to the confusion, all the running times were different from version to version as well.
It was decided that the team would restore the programs as closely as possible to the U.S. edition first broadcast in 1980, keeping only the brief science update epilogues from the 1989 edition, and adding a handful of new updates hosted by Druyan. By recreating the original shows, Gibson could go back to the mono audio stems used to for the original stereo mix and create a new 5.1 surround track. If the shows could be pieced back together, he wouldn't have to re-edit the audio, and could instead just pull the tracks and remix them.
Determining which edits were from the original production was no simple matter, however. Wyskocil and Efren Rivera, a veteran tape operator handling the 1-inch mastering for the re-release, had to sift through dozens of videotapes.
Wyskocil explained, "We were working from edited masters, but every time a 1-inch tape gets dubbed, well, it's an analog medium, so you pick up a little bit more noise, texture, grain pattern and color chroma; it gains more movement in the image. The first thing that we had figure out was which were the oldest shows and which were the best, regardless of what the labels on them said. A number of them had been labeled and re-labeled so that you couldn't see what was under them, and some of them were missing labels altogether. We had the blue shipper cases that 1-inches come in that would literally say "13" on it with a circle, so we didn't know if it was show 13, reel 13, a segment from 13 or something else!"
The painstaking detective work highlighted the good fortune that Wyskocil had come back to Cosmos after two decades: "When I worked on the show back then, I was one of the assistant directors, so I was responsible for post-production on four of the 13 episodes. I was the one who ended up doing all of the final assemblies, so I was familiar with all the shows. Also, as we went through the tapes, I was able to recognize signatures and initials on some of the labels as to who the tape operators were from way back."
TRANSFER TROUBLES
After determining the best source materials, Wyskocil and Rivera had to transfer the various 1-inch tapes to Digital Betacam. Wyskocil spent much of the project's first three weeks visiting facilities in Los Angeles, looking to see which one had well-maintained 1-inch tape machines and the clearest signal path. Bringing test samples of the 1-inch source material to each one, he would transfer it to Digital Betacam, then watch it on a Quantel Editbox, where he could compare the results and choose which facility got the job."A lot of testing was done up front to determine what we were going to do, because we knew that we only had one or two passes at those old 1-inch tapes," he said. "The tape sits for 20 years and when you spin a head against it, it wakes the tape up. Sometimes it was OK, and sometimes the oxide fell apart on the machine, clogged up the heads and became unusable, so you couldn't really test them a whole lot."
The project landed at IVC (Burbank, CA) where Rivera transferred the tapes on machines carefully maintained by engineer Don Estes. Despite the optimal conditions, the process was problematic--some tapes snapped and broke on the machines, while others had edge damage and stretching. Often, the engineers would track out the front of a tape, and by the middle, it would be out of tracking. Another issue was that one brand of tape used in the late 1970s had a piece of rubber around its hub for the tape to wind around; in some cases, glue used to hold the rubber in place had squeezed out on to the edge of the tapes. Just that tiny bit, however, was enough to gum up the machine and bring the transfer process to a screeching halt.
"We'd have to back up and re-track pieces," said Wyskocil. "We went through lots of tapes. We did find a few shows that were whole pieces, but we had to do a number of edits and re-transfers to continually find the right elements. What we found out is that anybody who has stuff that's about 20 years old better be archiving it and restoring it right now! These things are falling apart."
THE RECONSTRUCTION
Transfers rolled along from April through June, 2000, and soon off-line editor Russ Srole of Editing Technologies, Corp. entered the picture, piecing the episodes together as another new wrinkle emerged.The producers decided to add a slight amount of new material to the shows; in some cases, it was to replace artist renderings from the 1980 show with new photos from the Hubble telescope, but often photos were replaced with newer versions of the same photos.
The original series had used images from the Mariner satellites that went to Mars and from Voyager, which went to Jupiter. Those satellites collected and sent back data which was processed into breathtaking (but blurry) photos at the time; that same data processed with modern-day computers has now created images which are much clearer and sharper, so the producers made sure to include the new versions. Nonetheless, history still took precedence in some cases--when the program presented the first photograph sent back from Mars, it showed that first photograph, blurred though it might be.
New 3D animation was incorporated into some segments, and occasionally more recent video material was added; for example, footage of the Exxon Valdez oil spill now appears in a segment on ecological disasters. Due to the desire to create a new 5.1 mix from the old audio stems, however, none of the audio content or Sagan's dialogue was altered.
Once an episode was locked, a team of restoration artists--lead by senior artist Melody Dillberg Wyskocil--went through it with Quantel Editboxes, painting over dirt and scratches. Afterwards, colorist Brian Linse handled the tape-to-tape color correction on a DaVinci Color Corrector. "We didn't apply image processing or any of the typical things they do in a telecine bay to make a master good for a VHS release," he said. "They will use noise reducers and image enhancers and grain removal functions. I wanted a straight transfer from the Digital Betacam through the color correction machine and only to bring the colors that we knew were there in the signal up to today's digital standards."
The result was that the filmed portions of Cosmos were properly color-corrected for the first time: "You must remember, this was a PBS show, so after the studios got the good chemicals at the beginning of the evening, we'd get the crummy end of the chemical runs, and the prints and negatives had dirt and hairs in them. What people accepted 20 years ago as matching, you would never accept today. This was our chance to equalize all of the 16mm footage to match the 35mm effects and the 1-inch videotape. So we did two things--we matched the look, so you didn't have these big differences from scene to scene, and we brought a little bit more color out than was in the original masters."
THE HOME STRETCH
The first reconstructed episode was completed in May, and the remaining 12 followed, out of order, through the first week of October on staggered schedule. Once an episode was completed, Gibson would remix it at his appropriately titled sound company, Kent Gibson Sound Design. Meanwhile, DZN, The Design Group [Marina Del Rey, CA] created the menus and packaging design, coordinating those aspects with Gibson as well.Given that the program had been a hit around the world, the Cosmos: Collectors Edition set was intended to be a Region 0 release, playable on any DVD player. That meant serious consideration had to be given to translated subtitles; scripts and rough edits of the completed shows were sent to Gelula/SDI, a captioning company in Los Angeles. ("Even though the dialogue was the same, they needed to see what was on the screen," Wyskocil explained). Gelula provides "in-country translations," so the materials were sent to language experts around the globe. Their results came back to Los Angeles, were checked, turned into subtitle files and then emailed to Still In Motion.
With all the pieces in place, the shows went to Still In Motion's compression and authoring facility for encoding and image processing. A DVNR 5000 machine was used for noise reduction and image enhancement before processing in order to reduce MPEG artifacting from the encoding process. The shows were then compressed on a Minerva Compressionist 250, and the discs were authored on a Sonic Scenarist authoring system After seven months of intensive work, the final Disc Beta Protocol files were output to Digital Linear Tape and sent to Cinram for replication.
The seven discs and opulent packaging comprising the Cosmos: Collectors Edition DVD box set were completed in time for a Thanksgiving, 2000 release, but to date, it has only been sold on the internet at Amazon and carlsagan.com. Despite the hefty price tag ($169.95; $120 on Amazon), the set was still ranked 112 on Amazon's DVD sales chart at press time, six months after its initial release. Reportedly negotiations are underway to get both the VHS and DVD editions into retail stores soon.
Meanwhile, the efforts to create the box set have not gone unnoticed; in February, 2001, the DVD set won a pair of DVDA 2001 DVD Excellence Awards, with the "Package Design & Presentation" award given to DZN, The Design Group, and the "Video Quality And Presentation" prize going to Still In Motion. "Because we were able to control the process from being handed the original 1-inches all the way through, the image on the DVDs actually looks better than the original tapes," said Wyskocil. "Both Ann Druyan and Kent are very thrilled with the final look of the show."
With the restoration of Cosmos now complete, a two-hour "Best-of" special airing on PBS, and Cosmos Studios' newly-signed deal to create specials for the A&E Network, Sagan's legacy of bringing contemplative science to the masses continues, inspiring new generations to look at the night sky and ponder how, in his words, "The Cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be."
* * * SIDEBAR: A COSMIC EASTER EGG
In keeping with Carl Sagan's playful regard for science, the Cosmos: Collectors Edition DVD set includes a hidden "Easter egg" surprise, buried within its expanse of seven discs and 13 episodes.Steve Wyskocil, supervising producer at Still In Motion, LLC. (Los Angeles), explained, "My partner, Clive Bush, told Kent Gibson, the president of Cosmos Studios, about Easter Eggs and some of the things that other people were doing. They agreed that Cosmos should have an Easter egg. Cosmos Studios had put together a promo for The Best of Cosmos, so we jammed it on to Episode One's disc. It was just something special that the producers wanted to add that they didn't really publicize, just for people's enjoyment to catch."
TO FIND THE EGG: On Disc 1, go to the website address menu, highlight "main menu" and then press left direction button to reveal a Cosmos Studios logo; press enter to see a roughly 4-minute promo collage of the series.
