Subrata Mitra as a cinematographer with Satyajit Ray, the legendary Indian film maker, for "Pather Panchali" (1955). He continued to work with him for many of Ray's later films. He is known for pioneering the technique of bounce lighting, while filming "The Apu Trilogy". Satyajit Ray thought that "Subrata Mitra’s camera work is better than Raoul Coutard’s". Coutard was at the time much more acclaimed than Mitra having collaborated with Godard on many of his film projects. One of his most important technical innovations was his introduction of bounce lighting, which he pioneered while filming "Aparajito" (1956), the second part of "The
Pather Panchali the films were indeed destroyed by fire or the effects of age, other parts were salvageable. The materials were shipped to a restoration laboratory in Bologna, Italy: L’Immagine Ritrovata. Over a thousand hours of labor by hand were expended in restoring and scanning the negatives and, in the end, about 40 percent of the "Pather Panchali" negative was restored. (For those parts of the negative that were missing or unusable, duplicate negatives and fine-grain masters from various commercial or archival sources were used.) The Criterion Collection’s own lab then spent six months creating the digital version of all three films,