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Metro Stairway Led Zeppelin to Archangel

Metro Broadcast restores rare footage for stunning DVD

10 June 2003, LONDON --

The stairs at Metro Broadcast in London are steep, but they lead to a second floor suite where footage for the fastest-selling music DVD of all time was restored via a Snell & Wilcox "Archangel".

The DVD, simply entitled 'Led Zeppelin', shipped quadruple-platinum in the U.S. Directed by Dick Carruthers, who co-produced with Jimmy Page, the multi-year labour of love initiated by Page now provides what is called the definitive visual account of the rock legend.

Five and one-half hours of video material were culled from more than 132 cans of film negatives, some of it bootleg material that was acquired by Page and Carruthers after a worldwide search. Once the footage was cut together at Edit Video in London, Carruthers realised they still had a problem.

"I had a phone call one day from Dick, who said he had some damaged footage and he'd heard that we had some equipment that could help," said Metro Technical Facilities Manager Mike Smith."He came along with some footage and we did a five-minute test in our Archangel Suite. They went back, compared the restored footage to the rest in their edit suite and said, 'You've got the job.'"

Archangel has the ability to correct all the artefacts common to archive media, such as noise, dirt, scratches, unsteadiness and flicker - in real time.

According to Metro's specialist Archangel operator, Steve Willsmore, "When Dick brought in the footage, it was actually in final cut form. He was, however, concerned about the numerous tramlines that remained, and asked if we could help to clean it up.

"Of course, Archangel can deal with that and more. We also found some dirt and sparkle that hadn't been noticed, plus some film grain, mainly because the provenance of the footage was so varied."

The business of removing the tramlines was a start-stop procedure because of the multi-camera material. For example, footage from camera one would be fine, but footage from camera two would contain tramlines. So at virtually every cut, tramlines would reappear that had to be removed. However, with Archangel specifically designed to deal with such issues, the entire process took only one day.

Willsmore adds, "I told Dick that if he has another job like this, he could just bring in all the original footage and we could correct that ahead of time. It would subsequently save a lot of time and money in the edit suite."

The DVD includes key performances of the band from 1970 at the Royal Albert Hall, through to 1979 in front of more that 200,000 at Knebworth. Poignantly, Knebworth was to be Led Zeppelin's last ever UK appearance.

Metro Broadcast is the television facilities business of Metro, the media technology group that encompasses television facilities, live events, technology sales, engineering and new media. Metro is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the WPP Group plc, the world's No.1 ranked Communications Services group, with over 1,300 offices in 92 countries.
Contact: Nicholas Taylor, Managing Director, Metro, 53 Great Suffolk Street, London SE1 0DB. Phone: +44-20-7202 2000, Fax: +44-20 7202 2001 or email: info@metrobroadcast.com

Or Mike Smith, Technical Facilities Manager, Metro Broadcast, 5-7 Great Chapel Street, London W1F 8FF. Phone: +44 (0)20 7434 7700 Email: michael.smith@metrobroadcast.com

Snell & Wilcox Contact: David Cunningham, Press Relations Manager, Snell & Wilcox, Wenham Barn, Petersfield, Hampshire, England GU31 5AY. Phone: +44-1730-818904, Fax: +44 -1730-818248 or Email: david.cunningham@snellwilcox.com.