Robert Byrne is an award-winning film restorer specializing in early cinema and films of the silent era. Working with film archives and collections worldwide he has led restorations of more than twenty feature films and numerous short subjects. He has lectured at the Library of Congress, University College Cork, Queen's University Belfast, The Reel Thing Symposium, and numerous AMIA and FIAF technical symposiums. Rob publishes regularly on the topics of motion picture restoration and preservation and serves as President of the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, a nonprofit organization dedicated to live cinema performance and educating the public about silent film as an art form and as a culturally valuable historical record. Thierry Lecointe, independent re- searcher, has published numerous articles on the origins of cinema, particularly editions of the Domitor Society for the Study of Early Cinema,published in 2010, 2012 and 2014, and in specialized magazines such as 1895 revue d'histoire du cinéma. He is also the author of Le Cinématographe-Lumière dans les arènes (1896-1899) . He has given several conferences for the GRAFICS research group in Montreal, the Domitor association, the Jean Vigo Institute in Perpignan and the École Normale Supérieure in Paris.