“One of the exciting aspects I love about my job is seeing when star-driven but relatively unknown titles we’ve acquired get published,” said Jesse Baritz, vp of Acquisition and Development at the Los Angeles-based Multicom. “Many of the titles we take on haven’t been seen in decades, so it required a lot of work from Multicom’s team to take the assets and make them distributable.”
Baritz further explained that “In the eight or so years I’ve worked here, we’ve acquired a ton of Movies-of-the-Week (MOW) that aired on major U.S. TV networks but haven’t been digitized or streamable ever since. As of today, we have published 100 MOWs that aired on either ABC, CBS, or NBC in the 1980s and 1990s, and so far we have restored and re-released 39 of these in 4K!”
Baritz added: “I’ve curated some new collections on TheArchive [Multicom’s AVod platform] to draw attention to these fantastic movies. They star over 50 A-list film and TV actors of the era, including Helen Hunt, Brooke Shields, Michael J. Fox, David Hasselhoff, Martin Sheen, Christopher Reeve, Hugh Grant, Julie Andrews, Ann Margaret, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Angela Lansbury, and more.”
The restoring was done in-house. Explained Baritz: “Our company’s media archivists catalog, clean, and scan the 35mm reels and deliver our operations team and editors raw digital assets for color correction, QC, and delivery to our licensees and partners.” He noted that it takes approximately one week to restore a 90-minute feature film, but he wouldn’t divulge the cost, stating that “Multicom owns the equipment and facility, and employs the staff, so there are, of course, internal costs that go with that, but we rarely use external services nor incur additional costs for restoration.”
However, reaching other experts in restoration, VideoAge was told that converting to 4K costs between $3,600 and $4,500 per film if done, for example, in India. But, they added, if it involves extensive color corrections, it could cost more. Other estimates pointed out that the quality bar for restoration/remastering for streaming platforms has lowered pricing somewhat. A ballpark reference for a 4K scan of a film with moderate restoration and moderate color correction is $800/minute. Specifically, MTI Film has co-developed a proprietary algorithm with Samsung that has won a number of shootout comparisons with U.S. studios. From SD tape source, a reference price to HD would be $100/minute, including color correction.
About the exploitation of the restored film and TV content, Baritz explained: “One of the platforms that all of Multicom’s available content gets placed on is TheArchive.tv. [In addition,] our restored content is licensed to buyers across the spectrum of TV, home video, and digital platforms.” As for licensing options, Baritz said that, “Every deal is different. Some are cash, some are rev-share, and there is no standard term length. It depends on who the potential licensee is, in which territory they operate, the rights requested, exclusivity vs. non-exclusivity, and other terms.”
Another topic that Baritz didn’t want to address was the copyright status of restored public domain films, stating that, “Multicom does not generally restore public domain content. The titles [for this] article are all protected under copyrights, and the restored versions are all protected under copyrights.”
Pictured above is Jesse Baritz next to a poster of the restored Death of a Cheerleader, which aired on NBC in 1994.
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