First and Worst

Of the three films, Lowry says, the oldest was the most degraded. “In ‘New Hope’ we were getting many hundreds of pieces of dirt per frame. So there were scenes where there were literally a million pieces of dirt in one reel of film. It was unbelievable.”

Optical matching was the next biggest challenge because optical printing, which creates effects by running film repeatedly through a printer to pick up different elements, was used to create most of the special effects in the earliest “Star Wars” movies.

“Opticals are a little soft, and much grainier, because there are two more generations on film, and there’s a little more contrast,” says Lowry. “We try to match those scenes perfectly so they don’t telegraph that something’s going to happen, a light saber sequence, for example, by showing a change in picture quality. We removed that extra grain, reduced the contrast, and got the sharpness to match the prior and following scenes.”

The Macs Were With Him

To clean the films Lowry pushed high-definition scans of the original negatives provided by LucasFilm through his proprietary software running on 600 dual-processor Power Mac G5 computers, each with Mac OS X, 4 gigs of RAM and connected via gigabit Ethernet to a 378-terabyte storage array.

“We find that Macs hold up incredibly well, much better than PCs,” he says. “We put them in their own room with their own air-conditioning, as they generate a fair bit of heat.”

Lowry soon discovered that the project required fine-tuned programming as well as brute-strength processing. “We had to do some special work on these, actually build some different algorithms to try to deal with the incredible dirt levels and scratches. It was somewhat overwhelming.”

A tight release schedule compounded the problem. “They took about a month each,” he says.

“We ended up with something very nice. They look like new movies again.”

Clean Results

But three months, says Lowry, “given the 600 Macs,” was all he needed: “We cleaned it up, matched scene to scene, sharpened it end-to-end, reduced the granularity and got rid of the flicker and all the wear-and-tear things. We ended up with something very nice. They look like new movies again.”

The reaction at LucasFilm was unanimous. “We’re extremely happy with everything Lowry Digital did on the Star Wars trilogy. John’s bank of G5s, his process, his proprietary software created great results.”

Lowry expects that the next three episodes of the Star Wars saga, all shot digitally, and with hypothetically pristine digital masters, will require many fewer cleaning cycles, if any, for future releases.

Ward agrees to a point, but suspects he might be calling on Lowry again. “As the technology evolves and we get into a high-definition platform that is easily consumable by our customers, the situation is much better, but there will always be work to be done.”