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600 Power Macs Assist With Cleaning Up James Bond Movies

600 Power Macs Assist With Cleaning Up James Bond Movies

by , 3:10 PM EDT, June 12th, 2006

When the James Bond Ultimate DVD Collection hits stores July 17, 1962's Dr. No will look as fresh as 2002's Die Another Day, thanks to the 600 G5 Power Macs employed to clean up all 20 films in the series. Macworld UK's Jonny Evans reported that DTS Digital Images -- formerly Lowry Digital Images -- uses Power Macs for all of its projects (the company also cleaned up the Star Wars movies for their 2004 DVD release, among others) because of their reliability.

"Apple is our defacto solution," Mike Inchalik, DTS Images vice-president of strategy and marketing, told Mr. Evans. "Costs of ownership include repair, power and heat demands. Power is a big issue for us, as we are based in South California. We basically look at how many gigaflops of computing performance we get per operating dollar."

DTS handled 42 miles of film for the project, removing 37 million pieces of dirt and 74,000 hairs before turning to color restoration. The company used 700TB of storage, 45MB for each film frame, which was scanned at 4,000 x 3,000 resolution to accommodate future high-definition releases of the movies.

The article has more information about the process DTS went through to restore the films.

Observer Comments

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Close Name:Small White Car Posts: 1960 Joined: 02 Jul 2004
Mon Jun 12, 2006 3:52 pm Subject: For Those Interested

Anyone who finds this kind of thing interesting should check out a similar 2-page article on Apple's website about the restoration work done on "Raiders of the Lost Ark." It's about the same guy.

http://www.apple.com/pro/film/lowry/


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Close Name:Engine Joe Posts: 413 Joined: 29 Jun 2004
Mon Jun 12, 2006 4:11 pm Subject: Oh, great...

So the same people who managed to screw up the color in Star Wars can now screw up the color in the Bond films, too?

(for those who don't know what I'm talking about, just watch Luke's lightsaber in the first film for an obvious example. It changes color throughout the movie; most notably during the training session with the little christmas ornament thing... green, then blue, then green again...)


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Close Name:Small White Car Posts: 1960 Joined: 02 Jul 2004
Mon Jun 12, 2006 5:10 pm Subject:

Quote
Engine Joe wrote:
So the same people who managed to screw up the color in Star Wars can now screw up the color in the Bond films, too?


Given that LucasArts is constantly improving the effects in their movies every year I'd say it's probably impossible to simply guess that a problem like that was created by the image restoration team and not the Lucas-folks themselves.

For any other film your theory makes sense, but not for Star Wars. I can only imagine how many changes were made to that movie AFTER this company gave them their corrected scans.


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