"The original negative for Stagecoach has been considered lost for decades. For this edition, we evaluated several of the best surviving prints, both restored and original, before we found a 1942 nitrate duplicate negative that showed exceptional detail, gray scale, and clarity. We chose it as the primary source for this new high-definition digital transfer, created on a Spirit 2K Datacine, because we believed it was the best surviving film material of Stagecoach. For safety, a new 35mm fine-grain positive was made from from the negative as a preservation.
Inevitably, certain defects remain. The picture suffered from thousands of instances of blended-in scratches and debris, especially around reel changes and in action sequences. In cases where the damage was not fixable without leaving traces of our restoration work, we elected to leave the original damage. Through hundreds of hours of restoration work, we've manually removed the worst of the damage, along with dirt, splices, warps, jitter, and flicker, using MTI's DRS system and Pixel Farm's PFClean system, while Digital Vision's DVNR system was used for small dirt, grain, and noise reduction. Additional restoration was performed with the help of Reliance Mediaworks and its propriety software".