Shemaroo Studio has won a contract to digitize and restore content created by or for the Government of Maharashtra. The company will restore around 4000 minutes of content, including several short stories and documentaries from Negative/Print. Shemaroo had set up a Digital Post Production Studio in 2001, and claims to have restored over 450 films till date, and has worked with several studios to restore films, including those from Yash Raj Films and Vinod Chopra Productions, Kumar Gaurav among others. Some films restored by the company include Mohabbatein, Veer Zaara, Anand, Chupke Chupke, Kaajal, Mahaan, Mera Gaon Mera Desh, Deewaar among others. Other than restoration, Shemaroo says it also does Digital Scanning and Archiving, Digital Intermediate, Visual Effects, SD/HD all conversions, Satellite transfers, SD/HD Audio post production, IPTV/Mobile conversions, Blu Ray/DVD/VCD Authoring etc. To be honest, we haven't heard of many significant digital restoration deals. Reliance Mediaworks, formerly AdLabs, also has a digital restoration unit; its US subsidiary, Lowry Digital was doing some restoration work back in 2010, and in 2009, had bagged an order for restoring content from the National Film Archive of India. We'll try and get an update on this. Copyright & Government Funded Content The government might be funding the restoration of content, but frankly, we don't think it should be under copyright. In our submission to the government at the time the copyright act was being finalized, we had said that we want the introduction of creative commons and for content (and software) created with…
