600 Power Macs Assist With Cleaning Up James Bond Movies

June 11th, 2006 at 3:00 PM - News by Brad Cook

When the James Bond Ultimate DVD Collection hits stores July 17, 1962is Dr. No will look as fresh as 2002is Die Another Day, thanks to the 600 G5 Power Macs employed to clean up all 20 films in the series. Macworld UKis 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.