Except for the color bursting from the reception-area movie posters — The Double Life of Veronique, Black Orpheus, and the Beastie Boys Video Anthology among them — the Criterion Collection's new Park Avenue South headquarters in Manhattan are styled in the same palette as many of the films that the company painstakingly restores and releases on DVD: black and white, with profound gray areas all over.

This color scheme is especially apparent in the 22 x 18-foot, four-row, 24-seat screening room, where the black-accented charcoal-hued seats are parked on a pewter-colored carpet — all of which is encased by your basic white walls. Even the piece of gear under the plastic tarp up front blends in perfectly: a several-generations-past Sony Wega 60-inch LCD rear-projection TV. (You know the one: a dull, plastic silver cabinet, with a black border framing the screen.)

Only thing is, this aging HDTV will be seeing a limited tour of duty, because Criterion has decided to upgrade. The company had installed a smaller screening room in its old headquarters on Manhattan's East Side, but that was just a place for checking out finished product. The idea now is to have something much bigger and more versatile — thanks to some input from your friends at Sound & Vision. (Read on.)

"This is going to be a room that all the producers developing content for DVDs can use," says Criterion technical director Lee Kline. "It's very important for us as a company to see our own movies this way. It doesn't make sense to have only the two people who work on a title see it. We all have to be on the same page — whether you're answering phones or whatever. It's part of our philosophy."

More important, the new screening room will be used to quality-test the company's work. But instead of reproducing a movie theater, the goal is to mimic the kind of environment where most of Criterion's customers watch its releases — that is, a high-end home theater.

So why is that old, tarp-covered Wega the only piece of A/V gear holding court in the room? Because before embarking on a mega A/V-hardware shopping spree, Lee had an idea — a diabolcally super-ingenious idea.

"We actually came up with a wish list of equipment we wanted," Lee recalls, gazing out upon his unfinished screening room. "And we did that by looking through Sound & Vision every month and saying, 'Oh, this thing's coming out,' or, 'That one looks good.' So we thought, well, why don't we just call Sound & Vision and have them help us with it? Sure, we could have done it all on our own, but we're not good at setting up consumer environments. We don't have that knowledge, because we don't test all that equipment to use as a consumer would. That's why we needed someone who does."

Okay, Lee, you can stop with the buttering-up. You had us at "Why don't we just call Sound & Vision?"

Good idea. We'll hook you up.

Past Perfect
To better understand why Criterion wanted the kind of screening room it did, it's important to know something about what the company is. Yes, it's known for reissuing titles like Days of Heaven, The Lady Vanishes, 8½, Rashômon, The Silence of the Lambs, and Traffic, and it's been critically heralded for the benchmark quality of its DVDs' picture and sound. But just what the hell does Criterion do, exactly?

That question was easily answered one day recently when I visited the company's new headquarters. During a Lee-led tour of the facility, we stopped in one of the quality-control rooms. There, Betsy Heistand, a digital-restoration technician, was busy working on Overlord, a 1975 Danish film about a young soldier's participation in the Normandy invasion on D-Day. The film is fictional, but it incorporates plenty of actual World War II newsreel footage. And there's the challenge: Aside from the usual frame-by-frame touchups, Betsy needed to make all the scenes look like they belong to the same movie. "The director [Stuart Cooper] wants it all to look seamless together," Lee explains. "The movie is challenging because it's made up of so much archival footage — which is also why the images had a lot of shake. We had to steady that in many areas."

Meanwhile, over in the audio department, Garry Rindfuss is working on restoring the soundtrack of the 1962 Japanese film Pitfall (a.k.a. Otoshiana). "I'm going through and removing things like dirt that actually become audible when you run the film," Garry explains. "I've put it through an automated process called CEDAR, which gets the really bad stuff. And now I'm just fine-tooth-combing it by running the film and zooming in on the waveform. When I hear something, or something catches my eye, I can use Sonic Solutions' NoNOISE software to basically redraw the waveform. The software will look behind and ahead and — let's say there's a speck of dirt right there. NoNOISE will sort of figure out, well, what was probably there originally? And it will basically recreate the waveform for me."

Adds Lee, "We try to take the movie back to when it was released: the best possible sound the first time you would've actually heard it. And in this case, that was mono on an optical track. We're not here to turn mono into 5.1 — unless the filmmaker wants us to do it."

The 23-year-old company has yet to jump into high-def, by the way, shunning both Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD for standard DVDs. "We're waiting for the formats to figure themselves out," says Lee. "If we wind up liking Blu-ray but Casablanca is only on HD DVD, we don't want people to have to choose. And we also don't want to confuse them by siding with one format over the other, because it's not our place to decide. Both HD DVD and Blu-ray have merit to us, and both look really good."

Criterion, though, is all for taking the resolution of its releases to the next level. "We're ready to go," says Lee. "We've mastered in high-definition for years now. We just have to take the tapes and compress them in an HD codec. We did a Blu-ray test of one of our titles, and we're really happy with the results."

Screening-Room Criteria
When the company moved into its new home, it built the space up from scratch. And with that effort came the inevitable minor mistakes. For instance, the shelf of one particularly long workstation sags in the middle, weighed down by heavy equipment. (It will soon be reinforced.) And the way another desk was situated near a wall caused anyone who passed by to collide with the person sitting there.

Criterion doesn't want to make the same kinds of mistakes with its new screening room. "The goal is to set it up properly and take the necessary time to do it," Lee says.

But there's already one hiccup. "It's got a drop ceiling — which is always a problem," notes S&V technical editor Al Griffin, who was enlisted to respond to Criterion's request for help. After evaluating the space, Al concluded, "The ceiling's going to rattle like hell when they put a subwoofer in the room. They're just going to have to do a lot of reinforcement and dampening to get rid of it."

The room might not be perfect, but Al feels they don't need perfect. "They're going for a casual experience. While they want to see how their DVDs are going to look in people's homes, they don't want the absolute perfect home theater. They want a real workaday situation, like something that the typical collector-enthusiast has. And I think that's fine. That's pretty much what I strive for."

What's needed now is the actual equipment for the screening room. All the consumer and professional disc and tape players are already in position over in the machinery room, where they're patched into the screening room. Missing are the video display, speakers, and associated electronics.

The crew carefully pondered the display options. "We talked a lot about what to get — plasma, LCD, projector," says Lee. "We ended up going for 1080p projection because we wanted to be able to throw a big-size image out there."

Al agrees: "I told them to just go with the front projector. That room is big — they need at least a 100-inch diagonal screen."

Adds Lee, "If we could just get that Panasonic 103-inch plasma, we'd skip the projector altogether. But 100-inch plasmas are a little expensive. We're like your readers: We do have a budget. But it would be great to have both a Panasonic plasma and a Sony projector in here so we could look at things on both."

Since it's not likely the super-sized plasma will come through, Lee and company had to choose what kind of front-projection screen they wanted. The left, center, and right speakers will be mounted around the screen instead of behind it — as they would be in a movie theater — so they know they don't need a perforated model.

The crew has also settled on 5.1-channel sound for the room. Even though 80% of its titles are mono, Criterion does release some 5.1-channel discs.

And what about automation? "We haven't thought about that yet," Lee admits. "We'll certainly test some new universal remotes. We want anybody who works here to be able to walk in and watch a DVD. We don't want anybody to be scared of the room."

Getting In Gear
Having evaluated its requirements, Criterion now needed to pick out the specific pieces of gear. Time to cue S&V's Al Griffin again. It didn't hurt that the Custom Electronic Design & Installation Association's big September expo — an annual event that's like the super-mall for home theater pros — took place right in the middle of the selection process. So Al attended CEDIA this year with Criterion in mind.

"They were leaning toward professional, studio-type speakers," says Al, who thought that was a good call. "That room is too large for consumer models. So I recommended Genelec speakers." The brand is well known for its recording-studio monitors, but in 2002 it also started producing home theater speakers (see page 104). As an alternative, Al suggested a B&W 703 Series system. For electronics, he gave a nod to an Anthem AVM-50 preamp and MCA-50 amp, an Integra DTR-8.8 receiver, and a Denon AVR-3808CI receiver.

For the visuals, Al suggested going with a Stewart Filmscreen StudioTech screen. And for the projector, he saw a nifty DLP model from Samsung, designed by renowned visual-imaging expert Joe Kane.

As we go to press, Al is leaving it up to Criterion to decide if it'll go with his recommendations full-on, partially, or not at all. And if it goes with the Samsung projector, will Joe Kane be able to pop by and install the unit himself? (Al sweet-talked, or "sugar-Kaned," Joe at CEDIA, but we'll have to see what happens.)

For answers to these and other critical Criterion questions, look to a future issue for the sequel. Maybe we should call it "A Room with a View."

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