Quantel Helps Make Alien Even Scarier

Voted as containing the fourth most scary moment ever in cinema and TV in a recent Channel 4 (UK) poll, Ridley Scott’s "Alien" is set to have cinema-goers leaping out of their seats all over again as a new Director’s Cut hits cinemas this Halloween. Featuring previously unreleased footage, newly rediscovered scenes found in a vault in London and a brand-new six-track digital stereo mix, the new version of the movie was restored and color-graded using Quantel’s iQ digital intermediate system at Modern VideoFilm in Glendale, California over a 12-month period. The results are something that Ridley Scott says make the film look as good as it did 24 years ago, perhaps even better.



It was a challenging job for the Modern VideoFilm team, however, as 24 years in storage meant the original negative had degraded to the extent that dirt, scratches and chemical stains all had to be removed using the iQ. The newly rediscovered scenes, including one Scott refers to as The Nest where Ripley finds the bodies of Brett and Dallas during the final climactic minutes of the film, also had to be perfectly matched to the other material, meaning that attention to detail during the color correction stage was crucial.



Luckily, the same company had just completed work on James Cameron’s "Ghosts of the Abyss" using iQ and were able to apply the knowledge gleaned from that to the "Alien" project. Scott worked on the project with Modern VideoFilm colorist Skip Kimball to make it all happen using the iQ in tandem with a da Vinci 2K Plus. The resulting look of the new film is astounding according to the artists who brought it back to life.



Two different versions of "Alien: The Director’s Cut" have been created, one for normal film distribution and another for digital cinema, while Modern has also re-mastered and restored "Alien 3" and "Alien: Resurrection" for inclusion in a special, forthcoming DVD box-set from 20th Century Fox.