600 PM G5 Macs remaster James Bond

Sony Pictures Home Entertainment has announced that it will release the James Bond Ultimate Edition DVD Collection on July 17th, offering sharper sound and images for all 20 James Bond movies which were remastered by DTS Digital Images using an installation of 600 Power Mac G5 systems. "Certainly, the Mac is the only computer that's touched this project," said Mike Inchalik, vice president of strategy and marketing for DTS Images. The company deployed 700TB of storage to support the project -- which took two and a half years to complete, according to Macworld UK -- scanning at a resolution of 4,000 x 3,000 pixels, which made each frame of every movie amount to 45MB in size. "Historically, when I joined the company it had about 200 Power Mac G4s. It was refreshing how reliable they were," Inchalik said.

Macs were chosen due to their reliability, as well as power consumption and computing speed per-dollar.

"Apple is our defacto solution," Inchalik noted. "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."

Inchalik stressed that Apple needs to remain focused on cost of ownership if it wants to remain on top of large-scale Mac installations. "Power Mac G5s remain at the top of that heap, but it may not be easy for them to stay there."

DTS had to digitally remove 74,000 hairs 37 million pieces of dirt prior to beginning color touch-up.

"This is true frame-by-frame digital restoration. When you have 42 miles of film, there's a lot to clean up," said John Lowry, founder of DTS Digital Images.

"We use information from many frames to create each new image. The grain noise is random from one image to the next, but we correlate the picture elements from frame to frame so we reduce the noise while extracting the finest detail from the images," the company founder said.

The process reduced movie grain to a consistent level across the movie, creating a sharper image in the digitally restored film.

Inchalik suggested that the technology DTS uses to enhance movies might also be used to provide for the portable video industry, over which Apple's fifth-generation video iPod currently reigns.

"It's interesting. On the one hand the industry is looking at how it can ensure the highest quality viewing experience on new formats like HD, but it is also looking at delivering the best possible experience on small screens - iPods and mobile phones, for example, which is a whole different game," Inchalik said.

"There are things we can do to make for a better quality viewing experience on iPods," he added.