The movies are full of unsung heroes, but few need to be heralded more than the men and women who help preserve cinema for future generations.

Film may be forever, but it takes enormous effort and expense to ensure these works don’t disappear. What once was a laborious process of chemical baths and duplicate negatives has been augmented with laser scans and massive digital files that provide a new kind of immortality.

One of the more prominent members of this small community of experts is Grover Crisp, executive vice-president of film restoration at Sony Pictures. Recently in Toronto as part of the ongoing Dreaming in Technicolor series at TIFF Bell Lightbox, Crisp educated a rapt audience about the 4K digital restoration of David Lean’s masterpiece Lawrence of Arabia.

Over time the celluloid used to capture images on film deteriorates, either due to chemical instability or mishandling.

Crisp’s work is the second major rescue of the classic 1962 film in the last few decades. In the late 1980s, a team lead by Robert A. Harris worked with the film’s original editor, Anne V. Coates, and Lean himself to do a traditional, photochemical preservation. The latest restoration was digital.

Analog and digital rescue of film begins in the same way.

“The No. 1 thing you’re going to want is the original negative,” says Crisp. If the original is missing, “you mix and match various pieces ― first, second, third, fourth-generation film materials, whatever it is ― to create a new, what we would call a restored negative.”

All these elements traditionally are strung together in what Crisp calls “a patchwork quilt kind of thing.” A new negative is photographed from these elements, then duplicated to make new prints.

Working strictly in the analog realm “was really not a happy circumstance” as “it was very disheartening to have to make trade-offs in image quality for a clean image.” Often you were “three generations away” from the source and “loss of image quality was really heartbreaking at times,” Crisp says.

With digital, “we can do things we could never do, we can fix problems we could never fix.” You can “record out to a new negative at essentially the same resolution as what you put into it.”

For any cinephile it’s hard not to get giddy watching a film of this calibre presented in such a fashion. In 4K, Lawrence of Arabia is arguably more breathtaking than it was in 1962.

There’s a certain charm to film projection with all its faults that leads some to prefer a washed-out, scratched or damaged print to a properly restored version, but Crisp notes that “David Lean was, if anything, a perfectionist.”

Given a choice between a pristine 70mm print and 4K, Crisp “would show the digital version because it’s closer to perfection.”

Plus “Coates and Harris are saying Lean would have loved this, and that makes me feel good.”

Lawrence of Arabia: by the numbers

Released: December 1962

Original Budget: $15,000,000 U.S.

Awards: 10 Oscar Nominations, 7 Wins (including Picture, Direction, Editing and Cinematography)

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Length: Originally 222 Minutes, or 24,987 feet of 70mm Film

Restorations: 1989 (216 minutes), 2012 (227 minutes)

Digital scan size: 8K (8,192 by 3,584 pixels)

Scanning: Six months to capture around 325,000 frames

Total Project time For Digital Restoration: Three years