While scanning headlines this morning, I happened upon a NY Times article about Lowry Digital, a private company that specializes in restoring and archiving older movies using new digital scanning techniques and Apple computers. The story itself wasn't new, Apple did a piece on the company last year. What is interesting to me is that they are currently scanning some of my favorite movies, namely all of the James Bond films with Sean Connery.
Here's the interesting part:
Excerpt from 600 Macs, 4,000 Lines, One Giant Leap for DVD's
To put the magnitude of 4,000 lines in perspective, a television displays broadcast signals as 480 lines. High-definition televisions have up to 1,080 lines. (The greater number of lines, the more detailed the image -- the more closely it resembles a seamless, lifelike picture.) Impressive as HDTV looks, 35-millimeter film has far more color and detail. Engineers calculate that 4,000 lines of data would be needed to reproduce all the visual information in a frame of film -- exactly as many lines as the Imagica delivers.
So, if it scans an original camera negative, as it's doing with "You Only Live Twice," it creates a data file that's a virtual duplicate of the negative.
So, I don't have to worry about these films ever falling out of print, since each frame will forever be stored digitally for use with whatever display distribution method comes after DVD and HDTV. Now if only I could get Jill to enjoy Connery.
As a side note, while looking for a picture to grab for my entry, I stumbled across the MGM site for James Bond, along with Miss Moneypenney's Rolodex -- interesting for a bit of Bond trivia.
