Rare early Biograph Company films, unviewable for decades, captured at 5K to create the first stable digital masters.
In the late 1800s, the Biograph Company shot on 35mm stock with a single perforation punched in-camera for each frame, instead of the four perforations standard film uses. Run on normal sprockets, those reels would be torn apart, and no photochemical or digital system before this could safely copy or project them. For decades the material simply sat, unviewable.
The Reflex scanners were able to digitize the films by capturing images based on the position of the single perforation. Each frame was captured at 5K with an overscan wide enough to record both the image and its lone perforation.
The first stable, high-resolution masters of these Biograph Company films, viewable for the very first time.
The project also involved digitizing the only known existing footage of the inaugural 1915 New York City subway run, shot on standard four-perf stock but badly shrunken and brittle. It needed careful transport and handling to scan without further damage, and now stands as a vivid record of a landmark public event.
Flexible scanning with custom perforation detection, high-resolution capture, and gentle film handling makes it possible to preserve fragile, non-standard early cinema and make it accessible to audiences for the first time.
