Similar to the apple.com Lowry article, but from the starwars.com
(dead) http://www.starwars.com/episode-iv/release/video/f20040916/index.html
(some pics in the wayback machine archive)
John Lowry: Restoring Films to the GalaxySeptember 16, 2004
Page 1
The growing popularity of films from all eras on DVD format has helped to illuminate a growing problem with some of the movie industry's greatest treasures -- they exist only on physical film stock, and that film stock is fragile and deteriorating rapidly.
When Lucasfilm began to prepare the trilogy for a digital release, they called upon John Lowry and Lowry Digital Images to step in to save the day. In the past four years, Lowry Digital has been hired to use their patented custom software processes to digitally clean and restore hundreds of films, including high-profile efforts on Snow White, Citizen Kane and last year's acclaimed http://www.indianajones.com/">Indiana Jones Trilogy DVD set.
At the Lowry Digital Images facility, over 600 Macintosh dual-processor G5 computers utilizing over 2400 gigabytes of RAM and 478 terabytes (over 478 million megabytes) of hard drive space processed each of the classic Star Wars films for over 30 break-neck days to create the stunning new versions fans will see in the Star Wars Trilogy DVD set.
"There are three key contributing factors to the degradation of film," Lowry explains. "Dirt, time and chemical damage due to conventional restoration processes."
When creating a duplicate of a scratched original, a wet-gate printer is commonly used. The master copy passes through a special fluid which temporarily fills any scratches or holes in the original. According to Lowry, this process is physically harsh and actually adds more grain and softens the images. Proper storage of the fragile film is also an industry issue. "Storage problems in the past have led to flicker, color damage and color flicker," says Lowry.
But the greatest challenge on the Star Wars trilogy was dirt damage. The more a film is used, the more dirt it accumulates. The unexpected success of A New Hope took a particular toll because each copy of the film ended up being played far more often than is usual, to the point where even Fox Studio's master originals began to wear out keeping up with demand.
"We have never seen anything quite this bad from a dirt perspective," says Lowry. "At some point the dirt becomes part of the picture and very, very hard to get rid of."
Over the years, Lowry Digital's computer algorithms have evolved from automating the removal of hundreds of pieces of dirt in a scene, to handling the 100,000 pieces of dirt in the http://www.indianajones.com/" target="_blank">Indiana Jones trilogy, to taking on the Star Wars trilogy which required automated and manual removal of up to a million pieces of dirt in scenes like http://www.starwars.com/databank/droid/r2d2/">R2-D2 and http://www.starwars.com/databank/droid/c3po/">C-3PO's arrival on http://www.starwars.com/databank/location/tatooine/">Tatooine in A New Hope.
The Star Wars restoration process began with a 10-bit RGB high-definition scan of the original negatives. This data was then used by a team at Lucasfilm and http://www.starwars.com/bio/industriallightmagic.html">Industrial Light & Magic to work with http://www.starwars.com/bio/georgelucas.html">George Lucas to do some significant color correction to the movies. This color-timed data was then transferred to Lowry Digital hard drives, to begin the massive clean-up effort.
Most effects in the original trilogy were achieved, at least in part, with the aid of optical printing -- a process in which one piece of film is passed through a printer multiple times, once for each effects element. With each optical effect layer, grain can be introduced and some of the original clarity reduced. "Every time there was a http://www.starwars.com/databank/technology/lightsaber/">lightsaber in frame, it was exceedingly grainy due to opticals," Lowry recalls.
"Sometimes the scratches were very bad," says Lowry, "at one point in Return of the Jedi there was a literally blue rain of scratches on two or three thousand frames. We were able to clean that up. Computers are pretty powerful, and when you've got six hundred of them, you can do some pretty amazing stuff."
"With digital restoration, you can make the image nearly as good as the director and cinemaphotographer were seeing when they shot the movie. If you get it back to that level, to what they were seeing in dailies, then I think we've won," adds Lowry.
"Star Wars was a very gratifying process because it turned out rather well."
Some of the links from the Lowry wiki, could have sentences about the SE:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lowry_Digital
http://www.studiodaily.com/filmandvideo/tools/otherways/4755.html (has SW comparison pic)