Photo illustration by Eric Yang
Lowry photo by John Skalicky

When George Lucas needed someone to restore the first three Star Wars films to their original glory for DVD, he turned to digital pioneer John Lowry. And when the James Bond film legacy needed to be rescued from the ravages of time, the studios called on Lowry as the best man for the job.

Why do Hollywood 's heaviest hitters go to Lowry and his partner, Ian Caven, to save their most valuable treasures and prepare them for future video technologies? Because Lowry's technique for using computers to restore movies has produced such stunning results that the DVD community is abuzz.

Their early work for Warner Bros. included North by Northwest, Gone with the Wind, Now Voyager, and Citizen Kane. Since then, Lowry Digital has grown to a staff of 60 and has been involved with many major restorations, including Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Singin' in the Rain, and the Indiana Jones and Star Wars collections.

I recently asked Lowry about his restoration process, which can create high-resolution digital masters that can be used as sources for not only present-day DVDs and HDTV broadcasts but also film prints, high-definition DVDs, and any future video format. We inevitably touched also on digital cinema, digital filmmaking, raising the quality of HDTV — and, of course, James Bond.

DVD transfers are usually scanned using the 480p (progressive) enhanced-definition or 1080i (interlaced) high-def formats. Why do you scan films at 4K, or 4,096 pixels, horizontal resolution — more than twice the 1,920-pixel resolution of the 1080i HDTV format?
If I'm going to restore a film, my objective is to capture everything that is on that negative, which probably has a limit somewhere in the 3- to 4K range (click to see “The Lowry Process,” PDF). If you scan it at high-def or even 2K, there's all kinds of information on that film that you just haven't got. If you scan at 4K, it captures everything on the film — everything. Most of the work we're currently doing is scanning the original final-cut camera negative — whenever possible we get back to the camera negative. We use a couple of 4K scanners that were selected for their very gentle handling of film. We create a digital master of everything on the negative, process it, and make a new “digital negative” that is just as good as the original camera negative in terms of resolution and grain structure, but without all the changes caused by age and wear and tear. We want it to look like what the director saw when he first screened his dailies — the first print made from the negative.

What do you do when you restore a film?
We start by reducing the amount of grain an d stabilizing the image, getting rid of the jitter, weave, and flicker. Film is a relatively delicate medium, and no matter how carefully you handle it, it will always collect a little more dirt and a few more scratches and even tears. Mildred Pierce had some terrible chemical deterioration. We're able to apply filtering techniques to remove all these problems and fix all kinds of other things that are wrong with the image.

Because you're working digitally?
Well, when you use a computer, if you can understand the problem, it's always solvable.

What made you abandon traditional photo chemical restoration methods?
With those restorations, you take the original camera negative, clean it up, and make another copy. I'm absolutely against that because it doesn't do the film any favors. When you use an analog process, you lose information with every generation of film. Cleaning and making another copy also makes the image grainier and much softer. In the older films, it also adds a bit of contrast, which blocks up the black and the white areas. That's the toughest thing to fix.

Sometimes you're forced to work with duplicate negatives because that's all there is. That was the case with Sunset Boulevard and Roman Holiday . But I always go back to the earliest possible element — even if it's severely damaged — and make the scan from that because we can fix damage digitally, but if the resolution is gone, you're in trouble. I want to capture everything that's there and make sure it's held for posterity. All of the Bond film restorations were scanned from final-cut camera negatives, and at 4K, the pictures are just stunning.

And from the digital negatives you can output to film or down-res for HDTV, high-def DVD, digital cinema, or standard DVD?
Yes.

Presumably, since they contain everything that's on the film negatives, the digital negatives could also be used as a source for any future ultra-high-def formats?
Well, in all the measurements I've done, I've yet to see much information on a film right up there at the 4K level — it usually rolls off between 3 and 4K. We've experimented at 6K, but, frankly, it's pointless on a standard 35mm film frame until there are better camera lenses and film stocks.

Were all those classics that you helped restore done at 4K?
We started out working at standard-definition on films like North by Northwest, Now Voyager, and Citizen Kane. Then we upgraded the image quality with our first high-def movies, which were Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Giant. Our first 2K movies were Roman Holiday and Sunset Boulevard. Now we do most of our transfers at high-def and 2K, but we also do a whole range of movies in 4K.

Does that include THX 1138, George Lucas's first film, which is just coming out on DVD?
No, that was done in high-def.

Because it didn't have enough detail to warrant a 4K scanning?
My guess was that it would make a reasonable 2K scan. Since THX 1138 was shot in Techniscope, which is half the height of a 35mm negative, 2K could capture all the resolution. Only the best-looking films have image resolution between 3 and 4K.

Since THX 1138 was far less popular than the Star Wars films, the negative must have been less beat up, but did you encounter any other problems?
It had been shot quite some years ago, so there were various kinds of degradation. Also, the actors were shot against a white cyclorama, and it was hard to make them look good without making the white cyc look ugly. Since everything was shot in a studio, they had to use faster films, which are grainier, and since it was a half-size negative, all the dirt, scratches, and grain are enlarged — big-time graininess.

Your restoration of Casablanca had much less grain than the previous DVD release. What are your criteria in deciding how much grain to take out?
We generally try to even out the grain so changes don't interfere with the storytelling. I don't recommend taking all the grain out of anything. I used to do more of that. We took out too much grain on Citizen Kane, but on Casablanca we left more in and it looks better. There's something comforting about grain for the viewer.

If we looked at something that was scanned, processed, and shown at 4K, what would we see?
We would see a picture that has a greater sense of reality. The digital-cinema committee in Hollywood has opted for a 4K standard, so there's no question that this is where the studios would like presentation to go. With 4K digital projection, the color will be very similar to what you see in film theaters today — but with the proviso that, if you scan the original negative, there are colors there that don't normally make it through the film printing processes. So with 4K the colors are more vibrant, subtle, and sharper. But the most striking thing is the resolution. The image quality at 4K in a digital theater will be similar to what you get with a good Imax presentation, but you'll be seeing it in a normal theater.

So it will be as good or better than film in every way?
A really good film print can have a better contrast range than a digital transfer shown on a present-day high-def digital projector, but that's up for grabs once we get 4K projectors.

Could most people tell the difference between the high-def images on their HDTVs and 4K ones?
Watching good movie images on an HDTV with a good-sized screen in the home is a stunning experience. People won't recognize the need for more resolution for a long time, as long as a good image is presented.

But in a movie theater, the audience would be astonished at the difference between a conventional film and a 4K image. You can instantly perceive it. Of course, it all depends on where you sit. If you're too far back, you can't tell the difference between any of these formats — film, 4K, 2K, or 1K.

What differences would there be between an image from a 4K camera and 35mm film?
A well-shot film has a very high density of information on it. Properly transferred, a film image scanned at 4K is better than the image directly from a 4K camera sensor.

Can you tell me what movies you're working on at the moment?
We are doing work for four major studios, but I can't talk about most of those yet. We are working on Aliens of the Deep for Jim Cameron. The other work that I can talk about is on three James Bond movies that are in various stages of restoration.

Which ones?
On Her Majesty's Secret Service, Diamonds Are Forever, and we're finishing up some work on Goldfinger.

The picture quality of the previous DVD releases was disappointing.
These are stunning — they'll blow your socks off. We're doing all 20 James Bond movies — nine with 4K scanning, the others in high-definition.

Do the nine include all the Sean Connery ones?
I believe they're all in that group, yes. They wanted the older films to be restored as well as they could be. But keep in mind that Dr. No was a relatively low-budget film, made with no concept that this would lead to the parade of films that followed. So it was shot in a hurry and has some real challenges, like hairs in the film gate. By the time we got to the third and fourth Bond movies, the quality had improved immensely — very professional by the time of, say, Thunderball.

Describe the differences we'd see between the previous Bond DVDs and the images you're creating now.
The major difference we get using high-definition scanning and processing is the higher resolution that migrates to the DVD. It breaks the rules, but it works. You Only Live Twice was one of the films we worked on to demonstrate the process to studio executives. We scanned and enhanced the material, and then reduced it to DVD resolution to show the folks at MGM what the DVD would look like. Comparing that with the prior results — it was like a brand-new movie. It has to do with whether you process at high-def or you process at 2K or 4K and then reduce to high-def. Certainly the best results we get — for HDTV broadcasting and future high-def DVDs — are on things we process at a higher resolution. The fine detail does migrate down to the next level, without question.

The detail in Casablanca was much more striking than on North by Northwest. Was this due to different scanning resolutions?
We did Casablanca at 2K. That led to a significantly better result than North by Northwest, which was done at standard-definition .

Are there plans to rerelease the Bond films theatrically?
I haven't heard anything, but I do know that when these are finished, we could have some stunning theatrical prints. The picture on You Only Live Twice is better than it has ever been. As digital cinema becomes more pervasive, the cost of distributing older films will be so low that you could have Thursday-night classics at your local theater. And they could pack them in.

Is there a classic film you'd love to get your hands on?
Well, I'd love to do The Wizard of Oz , just because it's a lovely film and it needs a lot of work.

But to a lot of people, it already looks gorgeous. The DVD is often used as a demonstration disc in showrooms.
I'd take it somewhere else. People are much more aware of quality now and of what is needed. DVD did wonders for that.

I was watching a laserdisc of The Bandwagon the other night, and I couldn't believe how awful it looked.
And eight or ten years ago we thought laserdiscs were beautiful, so you get a whole new perspective. DVD has raised the bar, and now HDTV broadcasting and the high-def DVDs that are coming in the next year or so — certainly by the end of 2005 — will really raise the bar on overall sensitivity to image quality, because the picture has five times the detail of DVD.

I've had a number of studios come to me in the past month saying, “We did this high-def transfer 2 1/2 years ago, but we're not too happy with the quality now and are concerned about whether it will be good enough for high-def DVD.” These are recent high-def transfers, and they're already saying that we need to take another look.

Even with DVD, you sometimes see things, like an actor's makeup, that weren't meant to be seen. Is higher resolution always better?
We just did Mary Poppins [due out on DVD in December] and that's a case where, when you clean it up properly, you can see some of the wires. It's the same as when you can see the shadow from a boom mike. But we can go in and fix those things. One of the studios we work with is now taking the position that we've got to look at the intent rather than the result. Intent instead of saying, “Well this is the way it turned out and that's history, and that's the way it has to be.” This opens up the possibility of eliminating things that interfere with the storytelling. And that, after all, is the purpose behind everything we're doing.