Human Highway and Rust Never Sleeps films to Blu-ray & DVD
I'm pleased to report that two films we worked on the post-production and restoration of have had release dates set for Spring of 2016. Both will be available on Blu-ray and DVD.
http://ultimateclassicrock.com/neil-young-movies-dvd/
These classics, Rust Never Sleeps and Human Highway, saw a nationwide screening last month as a double bill, courtesy of Fathom Events.
http://ultimateclassicrock.com/neil-young-movies/
For Rust Never Sleeps, we went back to the original negative of the film and had Bob Brian's team at Headquaters in Burbank painstakingly clean and restore it frame by frame. On the audio side, I had the film mags transferred by Skywalker Sound at 24 bit/ 192 kHz which allowed Tim Mulligan at Redwood Digital to improve upon both the sound quality and overall mix. For the home stretch, Tim and I put together a 5.1 surround system in the big room at Upstream Multimedia where we fine tuned the surround presentation of the film before it got married to picture.
Human Highway saw a much longer and indepth restoration. It began with our team, lead by Toshi Onuki, in finding and restoring as many of the original picture elements and then working under the guidance of Neil Young to build the Director's Cut...a version that had been left on the cutting room floor in the early 80's. Not just figuratively, but literally left as strips of cut off film…on the floor. Added to this was some narration provided by voiceovers that Neil, LA Johnson and others had done almost 10 years ago.
I took the original 2" 16 track audio masters to Chace Audio and made Hi Res transfers only to find that we didn't have clean dialogue tracks. This sent me on a journey of playing back the source tpaes that were recorded to a Nagra deck on set...and locating the exact takes used in the edit.
After Mark Faulkner had put all the element together for picture and sound, we went to Pasadena, where Tamara Johnson created a tremendous mix.
Here is a nice article that discusses some of this audio work that was undertaken for Human Highway-