Pinewood Studios Group has bought a Northlight 2 from FilmLight for use in its media preservation, restoration and archive facility.

The film scanner will be used exclusively to help restore titles from the Studio Canal British Library archive which includes more than 140,000 items including the Ealing film library.

Pinewood’s new facility also includes state-of-the-art temperature and humidity controlled vaults for storing archival elements.

Darren Woolfson, the group director of technology for Pinewood Studios Group, said: “Restoration work has often been undertaken by companies with a DI infrastructure who do a bit of restoration during downtime. We’ve come at this from a different angle. We have built a restoration department to deal exclusively with restoration work. We have a film handling area and an area for performing physical repairs to film media. We also have an area devoted to restoring film sound. It is a fully set up picture and sound restoration department.”

Pinewood’s work on the StudioCanal British Library archive started in November 2009 and is part of a contract with StudioCanal and Optimum Releasing.

Titles already restored include Lionel Jeffries’ The Railway Children (pictured) which has now been re-released and made available on BluRay and DVD.  

Other classic titles being worked on include Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom and Robert Hamer’s Kind Hearts and Coronets.

Pinewood will also serve as a FilmLight beta site for developing film scanning technologies for restoration.

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