Restoration
The current version released on DVD by Koch-Lorber Films is a completely restored version of the original.
The film was originally shot on Eastman negative stock which rapidly faded and became almost unusable. In addition, the various copies of the film used in the cinema circuit also gradually lost their quality, which meant that Umbrellas could never be seen with the rich colours that Demy had originally intended.
Knowing that the Eastman stock would fade over time, Demy fortunately, had the three main yellow, cyan and magenta color separation masters made on black and white negative films that couldn't fade (a process similar to the creation of the older Technicolor process: see the article on Technicolor for an explanation of this 'three-strip' process).
These black-and-white prints had greater longevity and in the 1990s, Demy's wife, film director Agnès Varda, headed a project to create a new colour negative from the three black and white separations from which newly-restored full-color prints could then be made. The resulting film recaptured Demy's vision of a fantastically colourful Cherbourg.
In addition, composer Michel Legrand assisted in restoring the original 4-track stereo sound masters to digital and remastering his score to produce a higher-quality version, now available on CD.
Read more about this topic: The Umbrellas Of Cherbourg
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