Rest in Peace - Film Restoration Executive John D. Lowry

Originally Posted by Dave B Ferris 

Yes.

AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:

Now, we remember a man who breathed life into old movies. John D. Lowry died late last month at the age of 79. He was the founder of Lowry Digital Images, a company that restores classic films so they can be released on DVD and his resume speaks for itself.

(SOUNDBITES OF FILMS)

CORNISH: That's "Casablanca," "Snow White and the Seven Dwarves," "It's a Wonderful Life," "Empire Strikes Back," "Gone with the Wind," and "Raiders of the Lost Ark."

Well, earlier today, I spoke with Mike Inchalik, John Lowry's business partner and friend for the past 15 years, and I asked him to explain the process that Lowry pioneered.

MIKE INCHALIK: Movies and television shows that sit in archives around the world, as they age, are generally copied onto new pieces of media, meaning a piece of film is copied onto a new, less brittle piece of film every 10 or 20 years to keep it usable. But every such copy, as we'd all be familiar with, if we were to Xerox a document and then Xerox the copy and do that over and over, every time you do so, that picture gets fuzzier, the contrast gets worse. There's dirt and scratches from the glass, et cetera.

And, in very simple terms, John and his team of engineers built software that would automatically look at a sequence of pictures and decide what belonged and what didn't so that it could discard defects and also improve the inherent quality in what had survived all these copies.

CORNISH: So, for a film like "Roman Holiday," Lowry said that they removed hundreds of pieces of dirt from each of the 17,000 frames, so, I mean, you're talking about a lot of specks and dirt, right?

INCHALIK: Exactly. Well, in fact, my guess is that movie's more like 117,000 frames long. The average movie is about 150,000 frames long. And I think we computed for the Disney folks that, literally, the number of pieces of dirt and scratches removed on a single film rung in the hundreds of millions.

Over two-and-a-half painstaking years, Lowry’s company and MGM worked on restoring picture and sound quality on Bond films from 1962’s Dr. No to 2002’s Die Another Day.

While the computers handled most of the automatic processes like dust removal, more complex problems like torn film had to be fixed manually, taking up to 20 minutes per frame – and keep in mind that a two-hour film has approximately 172,000 frames.

It sounds like the definition of tedious work.

“Tedious is the last word I’d use to describe my job,” Lowry says with a laugh. “I think of the process as puzzle-solving. What caused this problem? How can we fix it? It’s often a mind-bending process.”

One of the most challenging films to restore in the Bond series was the first film, Dr. No, whose negatives had degraded over the years due to numerous reprints and lack of care before the franchise had taken full bloom.

Originally Posted by JParker 


Also, see this older article on restoring James Bond:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/spl/restoring-james-bond.html

He will be missed...but he leaves a wonderful legacy.

Originally Posted by Robert Harris 

Lowry Digital, now Reliance, is in my humble opinion, still the ONLY post facility capable of removing grain, while concurrently increasing image resolution, and then re-graining (video noise, essentially) to create a viable image.