The past year and a half I have been working on and off on the restoration and reconstruction of the video documentary ''Mountains Protect'' (director: Coen van Hall, Betacam SP) from 1993. The documentary sketches life in Badakhshan, the Pamir highlands in Tajikistan (Central Asia), using sung poetry. I was responsible for the audio on location, offline editing and restoration.
Although the documentary was planned to handle about local music and sung poetry, the political and social situation in Tajikistan was complicated after the civil war of 1992 and the opening of the Soviet Union. As a result, the film also outlines the social and humanitarian situation at that time. We were the first Western camera crew in the area.
About 15 years ago, the idea arose to digitize the video for the internet. The attempts to do so were disappointing. It took another 10 years before Betacam SP video equipment became affordable, which made it possible to experiment in our own studio. In 2023, it turned out that the 3 master tapes we had had been affected by time. Cutting and pasting the digitized material from these 3 tapes led to the reconstruction above. There is always something to be desired; The video contains fragments from a Russian film from 1927 that have acquired too high a contrast. It is give and take. Videotape is biodegradable...
The material has been upscaled from the original SD video format (720 x 480 pixels) to HD (1920 x 1080 pixels).
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