Who Owns These Newsreels?

The Hearst Metrotone News Collection is owned by the Regents of the University of California.
Since 1981 it has formed an important part of the UCLA Film & Television Archive.

If you believe that any of these materials infringe on your copyright or other rights, you may request that we investigate.

How Can I Use These Film Clips?

At this time this website is making these film clips available only for personal study and for use in limited educational settings. We intend and expect that wider usage may become possible in the future, but the conditions have not yet been defined.

Please direct inquiries to [email protected].

What Are Newsreels?

Read more about newsreels and the Hearst Metrotone News Collection at UCLA.
You can also visit the website of the UCLA Film and Television Archive to learn more about their newsreel activities at www.cinema.ucla.edu/hearst-metrotone-news

What Is the Original Film Format?

In nearly all cases the original format was 35 mm movie film. The Archive holds many original camera negatives and original release prints, as well as fine grains, duplicate negatives, and soundtracks.

How Much Film Exists?

The collection contains about 25 million feet of 35 mm film (almost half of it nitrate) and about two million feet of 16 mm film, as well as extensive paper documentation.

How Were the Films Digitized?

We have been using a Scanity High Dynamic Range Film Scanner. Our standard Raw Scan size is 4300 × 3324 pixels at 16-bit grayscale. Each frame has a raw tiff file size of 28 MB.

Scanning is just the first step. We need to adjust the “timing” (essentially the brightness and contrast) and mask the portions of the film frame outside of the image. The soundtrack also requires attention, and it sometimes comes from a different piece of film. We have only done an initial rough editing of the raw images, to make it possible to exhibit them as quickly as possible. For this reason, some portions of the films may seem too light or too dark, and portions of the soundtrack may be visible at the edge. We are aware of this and will gradually improve them. The images on this website have a maximum resolution of 1440 × 1080. So far we have scanned only about 15% of the total.

How Does the Search Function Work?

Normally you can just type a word or phrase, and you will see all the summaries and titles that contain it. But the search will also match a series of letters within a word, so a search for "opera" will also yield "operations," "cooperation," "operative," and so forth. To prevent this, you can type the "#" character before or after the word (or both).

If you only want stories that match two different words or phrases you can separate them by the "&" character.

How Do I Learn About the UCLA Film & Television Archive?

Please Visit https://www.cinema.ucla.edu

What Is the Packard Humanities Institute?

Please visit https://www.packhum.org