Sean Coughlin
Founder, President & CEO, ImagePro
Sean Coughlin is Founder, President and CEO of ImagePro and founder and former president of Cinetech, which became the world leader in film preservation and restoration under his watchful eye and hands-on management style, capturing over 50% share of the entertainment market.
Coughlin’s career in the film service industry began in 1980 when he joined a specialty film laboratory in Northern New Jersey. There he mastered the intricacies of working with film and the special care required in handling, restoring, preserving and archiving classic films. In 1990, he moved to California where he founded Cinetech with a strong dedication to customer service.
Coughlin has restored or preserved over 8,000 films, including some of the most important films of the 20th Century — from Birth of a Nation to The Wizard of Oz to Titanic.
Increasingly, the Hollywood studios became concerned about the potential loss of classic movies due to lack of proper storage and maintenance in past decades. And with the growing global market for filmed entertainment brought on by a wider range of distribution systems — from DVDs to downloads to streaming video — new and old products have been and will continue to be in demand to fill the content pipeline.
He built a full-service laboratory in Valencia, California, which was acknowledged as the state-of-the-art facility in the entertainment market and worked on film from every major film library in the world, including MGM/UA, Warner Bros., Fox, Disney and Sony Pictures Entertainment, the Frank Capra Collection, the Library of Congress, the UCLA Film & Television Archive and the Museum of Modern Art.
Coughlin has also consulted on many projects of historical significance where his film knowledge and keen eye have proven of value. He was personally involved in the restoration of such film classics as Intolerance, Napoleon, Birth of a Nation and early Thomas Edison films.
With the advent and deployment of digital imaging, Coughlin transported his understanding of moving film and still images to their translation into digital formats with a mastery of encoding, repurposing and digital manipulation. He created a whole new services business helping customers throughout the entertainment industry, as well as museums and collections outside entertainment, to manage the conversion of their traditional image assets into the new digital world and to broaden their use.