Restoration, Digital Scanning and Remastering 

The digital era’s new film scanning capabilities brought new opportunities for film preservation and remastering of old movies. These and other technologies would also provide a hope-filled pathway towards the completion of Manifest. For many years, Garza-Treviño researched available processes,

new technology, all while facing mounting costs.

Early motion picture scanners worked with a pin system that caught the sprocket holes using the conventional mechanism from celluloid film. In 2019, Garza-Treviño learned of a pin-less  scanner made in Utopia, Texas by MovieStuff. This scanner utilizes a plate to hold the moving film and allows for flexible lens adjustment to frame the footage. Owner/inventor Roger Evans told Garza-Treviño: “You’re home.”
 

In 2020, the film was unpacked; 157 cans of 400 ft. rolls, about 63,000 feet of film, each roll with its own production log. The footage was organized by scenes with a 16mm Minette Viewer Editor.  During COVID, using a variety of restoration techniques, Garza-Treviño began the long, arduous process of cleaning and revitalizing the almost 40-year old celluloid footage.
 

In August 2021, Garza-Treviño invested in a RetroScan Universal Mark II and a Nagra 4.2 Sound Recorder in order to scan and remaster the film footage, sync it to the reel-to-reel audio tapes, and fuse it all into a digital format. Finally, in 2024, the years of detailed restoration work and time-consuming transfer to digital came to fruition with 2K 4:3 ratio (2048 x 1536) unedited digital film footage brimming with resurrected scenes of an Austin of long-ago.

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