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Peeve Farm
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Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

On My Blog Menu:

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Monday, April 19, 2004
16:52 - Apple Owns the Future of Film
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/18/movies/18KAPL.html?ex=1083417214&ei=1&en=11a8b42c0

(top) link

JMH sends this story: John Lowry, working in Burbank (whew—Hollywood is still on the cutting edge after all), is pioneering super-high-def film transfers for non-degrading archival and HD-DVD transfer. And he's doing it all with Macs.

What he is doing will make a DVD look nearly as sharp and detailed as a 35-millimeter film print. It will produce images with six times the resolution of today's high-definition television sets. In video quality, it could turn home theater into a true rival of the neighborhood cineplex.

Walk into the suites of Lowry Digital, the company that Mr. Lowry started six years ago, and the first sight that strikes you is the computer bank — rack after rack of Macintosh G5 computers, 600 of them, holding a combined memory of 2,400 gigabytes.

Beyond this room is a super-sanitized, temperature-controlled chamber. Inside, a technician wearing a white smock and cap monitors a pair of machines called the Imager XE-Advanced, made by the Imagica Corp.

The Imagica machines are ultra-sophisticated digital film-scanners. They are loaded with reels from the original negative of the 1967 James Bond movie "You Only Live Twice."

The spools advance slowly, one frame every four seconds, which is how long it takes the Imagica to scan across a frame 4,000 times — a process known as 4K scanning.

During the scan, the machine creates a digital replica of the frame, consisting of 4,000 horizontal lines of data. A cable then transmits this data to a hard-drive server in an adjoining room.

A fascinating read. And check out that rack of G5s. For the money he's being paid, and for what that bank of CPUs would have cost, no way would he use anything but the best possible technological solution available. He wouldn't have chosen the G5 lightly.

Couple that with today's announcements from Apple—full-scale HD production at an iPod price point—and you've got a recipe for a complete Napoleon-returning-to-France rampage by Apple through the film world, with every production house flocking to the banner.

Apple's acquisitions and development of video-production tools over the past four years or so, beginning with Final Cut Pro and continuing through Logic, Shake, Pixlet, DVD Studio Pro, and all the adjunct software packages (like Cinema Tools, with its 24p editing capabilities), have been elements of a very quiet revolution; they don't make headlines, at least not in the consumer space. But it's been all the rage where it counts. Return of the King features a big Apple logo at the end of the credits (it was composited in Shake). And Lowry's high-powered digital bit shop, again, runs on Macs—a decision that could only have come about as a result of Apple having made its case consistently, persuasively, and relentlessly over the past half a decade as being the go-to company for high-end video technology.

CapLion has further ruminations on these developments, from the perspective of someone who works in this field on a daily basis. In his words:

...but I'm sure they'll go out of business any day now.


UPDATE: And of course we all know where the real money in filmmaking is...


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