http://tags.library.upenn.edu/tag/home+welles PennTags Feed http://tags.library.upenn.edu/makerecord/url/27500 http://tags.library.upenn.edu/makerecord/url/27500 Morris, Chris. &ldquo;Warner Finds Superior Source for &lsquo;Citizen Kane&rsquo; DVD Set.&rdquo; <em>Billboard </em>11 August 2001. 10 April 2008 &lt;http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&amp;db=keh&amp;AN=4958025&amp;site=ehost-live&gt;.<br /><br />Chris Morris writes this article in August 2001, just as the popularity of the relatively new home video format DVD was starting to gain popularity.&nbsp; Movie titles were released incrementally in this new all-digital format.<br /><br />Morris writes that the popularity of Orson Welles&rsquo;s <em>Citizen Kane</em> has created a high demand for the film to be released to the new DVD video format.&nbsp; Warner Home had been working on a 60th anniversary release and it was planned for the 25 of September in that same year.&nbsp; This new release was widely expected to be visually and sonically ungraded from the previous releases to home video.&nbsp; Morris writes that Warner, in their attempts to rerelease <em>Citizen Kane</em>, had originally not been able to find a suitable quality source film.&nbsp; RKO&rsquo;s original camera negatives had been burned in a 1980 vault fire and as a result had also hampered past efforts a restoration.&nbsp; The 1991 VHS release had featured the copy owned by New York&rsquo;s Museum of Modern Art, however this print had dirt and scratches on it, among other defects.&nbsp; Morris reports, however, that after patient and careful searching, Warner had found a new nitrate fine-grain print in a European archive and that this copy has offered better picture quality and served as an improved audio source.&nbsp; The improved audio quality is very important because the original score had a very high dynamic range.&nbsp; He also reports that the new DVD release would include an interview with Roger Ebert, a 1941 newsreel about the film&rsquo;s premiere, and the documentary film of the Hearst-Welles conflict, <em>The Battle Over Citizen Kane.</em><br /><br />One might think that just like a personal computer user, large Hollywood movie studios would have countless backup copies of their master reels.&nbsp; This seems not to be the case.&nbsp; A fire at a single film vault destroyed RKO&rsquo;s only master copy.&nbsp; Orson Welles was the recipient of the actual production negatives and his copy was also lost in a fiery accident in the 1970s.&nbsp; By re-mastering and fully digitizing the remaining high quality prints, the data can be stored in numerous locations very inexpensively and very safely.&nbsp; As we learned in class, nitrate has a propensity to catch on fire and is very dangerous in that respect.&nbsp; We also learned in class that Hollywood is usually very slow to adopt new media formats.&nbsp; DVD hit store shelves in mid-1997 yet this movie was released in late 2001, almost 4 years later.&nbsp; The studios might have an excuse in this case &ndash; the long and lucky search for a suitable master copy.<br />