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- Lowry Digital is a digital film restoration company based in Burbank, California. John D. Lowry (June 2, 1932 – January 21, 2012) was a Canadian film restoration expert and innovator who founded Lowry Digital Images in 1988. John D. Lowry gained industry recognition in 2008 for his computer-based proprietary algorithms used in the restoration of the NASA Apollo 16 and 17 mission films. As of December 15, 2006, Lowry Digital had 700 Apple Power Mac G5s, a server bay with 700 terabytes of storage and two $300,000 digital motion picture film scanners. The company is becoming increasingly involved in work on digital 3-D films, such as U2 3D and Journey to the Center of the Earth 3-D. Lowry Digital was instrumental in adapting existing technology and developing new image processing techniques that set a new standard for 3-D in the landmark film Avatar. The company was lauded for helping Avatar — the highest-grossing film in history — to earn its Academy Awards for technical achievement. 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 common 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 a 32-bit floating-point, can process any format like HD and 4K, and outputs to a pristine digital master. Lowry Digital's advanced digital image processing is also used to minimize grain without losing any quality, even in modern major motion picture releases like Miami Vice and Zodiac. On 16 July 2009, in time for the 40th anniversary of the moon landing, NASA tasked Lowry Digital to restore original video footage of the missing Apollo moon landing tapes at a price of $230,000. Lowry president Mike Inchalik commented that the video was "far and away from the lowest quality" the company has dealt with. (en)
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- Lowry Digital is a digital film restoration company based in Burbank, California. John D. Lowry (June 2, 1932 – January 21, 2012) was a Canadian film restoration expert and innovator who founded Lowry Digital Images in 1988. On 16 July 2009, in time for the 40th anniversary of the moon landing, NASA tasked Lowry Digital to restore original video footage of the missing Apollo moon landing tapes at a price of $230,000. Lowry president Mike Inchalik commented that the video was "far and away from the lowest quality" the company has dealt with. (en)
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