Lowry Digital Images

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Lowry Digital Images is a digital film restoration company founded in 1988 by John D. Lowry and based in Burbank, California. The company was known as DTS Digital Images while it was owned by digital audio company DTS 2005-2008 [1]. The company was acquired for $7.5m by India's Reliance Big Entertainment, which is part of the Reliance ADA Group owned by Anil Ambani in April 2008 [2] when it reverted back to its original name. The company is becoming increasingly involved in work on digital 3D films, such as U2 3D and Journey to the Center of the Earth 3-D.[3].

John Lowry gained industry recognition in the 1971 for his computer-based proprietary algorithms used in the restoration of the NASA Apollo missions 16 and 17 films. DTS, Inc. purchased the company on January 6, 2005. As of 15 December 2006, LDI has 700 Apple Power Mac G5s, a server bay with 700 terabytes of storage and two $300,000 digital film scanners.

Lowry describes the restoration process as overcoming three obstacles: wear and tear, age, and multiple generations of optical copies. Each frame is scanned into a high-resolution digital format, where the computer first checks for standard problems like size alterations or jitter. Then the files go through the lab's render farm for speck removal, which is then eye-checked frame-by-frame. The system works natively in 32-bit floating point, can process any format like HD and 4K, and outputs to a pristine digital master. Lowry software is also used to minimize grain in image quality, even in modern major motion-picture releases like Miami Vice and Zodiac.

[edit] Films that Lowry Digital Images has worked on

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