Follow up to Trent's Star Wars post

Here is an interesting article about the process of converting the films to DVD:


'Star Wars' emerges from darkness
By Mike Snider, USA TODAY

BURBANK, Calif. ? He whipped Indiana Jones into shape and cleaned up Sunset Boulevard.
Now John Lowry is the unseen force behind the sparkling new DVD versions of George Lucas' Star Wars films, which arrive Sept. 21 in a four-disc $70 box set.
Over the past four years, Lowry Digital Images has emerged as the pre-eminent destination for studios looking to prepare their classics for DVD. Having cleaned up the Indiana Jones films for last year's DVD package to the satisfaction of Lucas, director Steven Spielberg and studio Paramount, the Burbank-based firm earned the chance this year to do the same for the Star Wars trilogy.
Even though the original film elements of the three movies have spent most of their time resting in vaults, they had gathered wear and tear that would have been noticeable had they been transferred, as is, straight to DVD.
"The most popular movies are often, by far and away, in the worst shape," Lowry says. "They have been printed more often and been duplicated more often, and each of those passes adds scuffs, dirt, scratches and the like."
The high-definition video transfers of the first three Star Wars films (Episodes IV-VI: A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi) that Lucasfilm delivered to Lowry, he says, "were a little rougher than we expected coming in the door. I thought, 'Oh, man.' "
Especially prevalent were scratches and dirt on the Tatooine sand dune scenes in Episode IV: A New Hope and on the snowy slopes of the ice planet Hoth in The Empire Strikes Back. Lightsaber scenes in all the films, Lowry says, "were softer and grainier and had all kinds of dirt."
But Lowry mobilized the forces: 80 employees and 600 networked Power Mac G5 computers with the equivalent of 378 terabytes (378 million megabytes) of hard-disk storage.
The process: First, he analyzes the film and notes its biggest problems, be it dust or softness. Then he sets parameters for the restoration software. The computer system divides the film into segments and applies fixes, identifying flaws by comparing neighboring film frames. Lowry and his team check the processed scenes daily, frame by frame.
Restoration took about a month per film. As footage became ready, segments were downloaded onto a portable hard drive and shipped to Lucas for approval.
The result is as if a veil has been lifted: The annoying hail of visible noise is gone, and colors are richer. The footage seems to shine, as if brand-new. "We have given it the kind of sharpness which doesn't create ugly edges," Lowry says.
Beyond a stellar DVD, Lucasfilm now has a high-definition master stored in its vaults that won't degrade as celluloid does. The master can be used to make new film prints and high-definition DVDs.
Lowry's involvement in restoring the Star Wars films began with another space adventure.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration contracted with him to process the live broadcast feeds from the Apollo 16 and 17 missions to the moon in 1972. "We cleaned up the images and sent it back over microwave to Houston again, and it went out to the world," says Lowry, now 72, whose career in TV production began as a stagehand for the Canadian Broadcasting Co. in 1952.
Years later, his background in TV production and multimedia led him to develop the proprietary software that would digitally remove blemishes in films.
His techniques are not without controversy. Preservationists have voiced concern that digitization of films will create homogenization.
Movies get their own character through varying degrees of light-sensitive grain used in film stocks. (The concentrations differ much like thread count in sheets.) During digital film restoration and compression, grain can be lessened.
One of Lowry's earlier restorations, Citizen Kane, was criticized by some, including film historian Leonard Maltin, who said the result looked more like a TV video production than a film. Having done about 100 restorations since then, Lowry says, "If we had the chance to restore Citizen Kane again today, the quality would be vastly improved."
In the case of films such as Sunset Boulevard, in which the original print has been degraded or lost, Lowry's digital restoration is the only safeguard to losing the film entirely, says Ron Smith, head of DVD mastering for Paramount.
"You're giving new life to the film on DVD and also preserving and saving its life in archival terms."