John D. Lowry: Restoration Software
If you’re a real fan, you already own the recently-released “Adventures of Indiana Jones” (”Raiders of the Lost Ark,” “The Temple of Doom,” “The Last Crusade”) DVD set, and you like what you see: ridiculously clear images, bonus documentary, nice extras.
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Chances are you’d be equally impressed by what you don’t see, conspicuous flaws removed from the films by master digital restorer Lowry Digital Images. “One of the biggest problems we had with ‘Raiders,’” says CEO John Lowry, “was a blue line cutting across the actors’ faces right down the center of the first part of the movie, about 35,000 frames of scratches.”
And if you’re loading the movie now to look for traces of the scratch, don’t bother. Lowry’s digital botox, powerful proprietary software running on a formidable stack of Power Macs, removed all traces of the unsightly line that distracted so persistently from the more compelling vertical furrows on the brow of Harrison Ford.
Jim Ward of LucasFilm, who selected Lowry Digital Images, Inc., to restore the films, says his company first considered doing the clean up themselves. “We could have done a lot of the dirt removal, but we knew it wouldn’t be as good. We owe it to filmmakers like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas to make sure that these films are pristine.”
First Mover
By all accounts, few people do pristine as well as Lowry, who holds original patents on noise reduction in film. “The first clean up of this kind that was ever done was in 1971 when I processed the Apollo 16 and Apollo 17 pictures from the moon,” he says. “So I’ve been at this a little while.”
Recently he was awarded the James A. Leitch Gold Medal from the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers for his career contributions to digital technology and motion imaging.
Lowry set up Lowry Digital Images in 1988, intending to develop digital tools for sale or license, but first taking time to have his crew clean 20 movies to learn precisely where the problems were, so he could build correct solutions.
“Now that we’ve done 80 movies, we’re still discovering new things, but far fewer,” he says. His timing and tactics proved as good as his technique.
Explosive growth in digital distribution channels — DVDs, cable, HD TV, digital projection theaters, even the Internet — has every major studio looking at digital restoration, and looking at Lowry.
“In ‘Indiana Jones,’ we removed a piece of dirt from only every frame or two. For two versions each of three movies, that’s half a million pieces of dirt. In a typical old movie, you’re talking millions of pieces of dirt.”
Film To Go
It’s easy to believe that movies are forever. But a different message plays across the banks of busy monitors at Lowry’s offices in a converted aerospace plant in Burbank, CA: it says, without significant intervention, the only inevitable thing about film is that it decays over time.
You may have already concluded from watching movies through what looked like tape come unstuck from dirty floors — the swimming motes, the glowing hairs — that film is a fragile medium. You may not know that films before 1950 were shot on nitrate-based cellulose film, an unstable medium prone to disintegration, even conflagration. Fewer than half of those films exist today.
Dirty Movies
But when I suggest to Lowry that fans of recent films like the “Indiana Jones” movies might be surprised that the works of high-profile filmmakers with high-tech production cred would be in anything but pristine condition, he sits me down to explain the facts of film.
“In ‘Indiana Jones,’ we removed a piece of dirt from only every frame or two,” he says. “For two versions each of three movies, that’s half a million pieces of dirt. But for ‘Roman Holiday’ (1953), we removed hundreds of pieces of dirt from each of the 170,000 frames. In a typical old movie, you’re talking millions of pieces of dirt.”
Degrees of Degradation
As we walk the lab, Lowry outlines the three-part problem faced by film restorers, making frequent visual references to convenient examples from failing classics. “The first category is wear and tear. A popular movie tends to be more damaged simply because it’s been printed so often. Real bombs that never got printed have no broken sprocket holes, not a lot of dirt, no scratches. Even the most careful physical handling still adds dirt, scratches, blemishes and even tears. Film is a delicate physical medium.”
Lowry’s second category is age. “Just plain time results in fading and flicker. A sky might pulse from yellow to blue in a beat. On films from the 30s and 40s, you get this vinegar syndrome, and the film turns to dust.”
Third and most lethal, Lowry explains, is multiple generations of optical copies. “They’re the worst degradation that can happen to film because fine detail disappears with each optical duplicate made. We can fix dirt, scratches, tears, and flicker, but if the information is gone, it’s very hard to put back.”
Pressing his case, Lowry brings the evidence. Literal wear and tear in a frame from “North by Northwest” shows Cary Grant in a cornfield, torn in half at the waist. Aggregations of grain and dirt occlude third-generation dupes of “Roman Holiday” and “Sunset Boulevard,” the best extant versions of either film, because originals were lost.
