Details revealed of new digital masters for James Bond Ultimate Edition DVDs

As regular MI6 readers will be well aware, a project to remaster the classic James Bond films for new Ultimate Edition DVDs has been on the boil for some time now. MI6 reported back in April 2004 that new digital masters of the 007 films were being produced in preperation for a forthcoming set of DVDs set to supersede the existing Special Editions first released in 2000.

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John Lowry (of Lowry Digital) has given an interview to Sound & Vision magazine about the process, and discusses the James Bond project in part.

What made you abandon traditional photo chemical restoration methods?
With those restorations, you take the original camera negative, clean it up, and make another copy. I'm absolutely against that because it doesn't do the film any favors. When you use an analog process, you lose information with every generation of film. Cleaning and making another copy also makes the image grainier and much softer. In the older films, it also adds a bit of contrast, which blocks up the black and the white areas. That's the toughest thing to fix.

Sometimes you're forced to work with duplicate negatives because that's all there is. That was the case with Sunset Boulevard and Roman Holiday . But I always go back to the earliest possible element — even if it's severely damaged — and make the scan from that because we can fix damage digitally, but if the resolution is gone, you're in trouble. I want to capture everything that's there and make sure it's held for posterity. All of the Bond film restorations were scanned from final-cut camera negatives, and at 4K, the pictures are just stunning.

Presumably, since they contain everything that's on the film negatives, the digital negatives could also be used as a source for any future ultra-high-def formats?
Well, in all the measurements I've done, I've yet to see much information on a film right up there at the 4K level — it usually rolls off between 3 and 4K. We've experimented at 6K, but, frankly, it's pointless on a standard 35mm film frame until there are better camera lenses and film stocks.

If we looked at something that was scanned, processed, and shown at 4K, what would we see?
We would see a picture that has a greater sense of reality. The digital-cinema committee in Hollywood has opted for a 4K standard, so there's no question that this is where the studios would like presentation to go. With 4K digital projection, the color will be very similar to what you see in film theaters today — but with the proviso that, if you scan the original negative, there are colors there that don't normally make it through the film printing processes. So with 4K the colors are more vibrant, subtle, and sharper. But the most striking thing is the resolution. The image quality at 4K in a digital theater will be similar to what you get with a good Imax presentation, but you'll be seeing it in a normal theater.

Can you tell me what movies you're working on at the moment?
We are doing work for four major studios, but I can't talk about most of those yet. We are working on Aliens of the Deep for Jim Cameron. The other work that I can talk about is on three James Bond movies that are in various stages of restoration.

Which ones?
On Her Majesty's Secret Service, Diamonds Are Forever, and we're finishing up some work on Goldfinger.

Do the nine include all the Sean Connery ones?
I believe they're all in that group, yes. They wanted the older films to be restored as well as they could be. But keep in mind that Dr. No was a relatively low-budget film, made with no concept that this would lead to the parade of films that followed. So it was shot in a hurry and has some real challenges, like hairs in the film gate. By the time we got to the third and fourth Bond movies, the quality had improved immensely — very professional by the time of, say, Thunderball.

Describe the differences we'd see between the previous Bond DVDs and the images you're creating now.
The major difference we get using high-definition scanning and processing is the higher resolution that migrates to the DVD. It breaks the rules, but it works. You Only Live Twice was one of the films we worked on to demonstrate the process to studio executives. We scanned and enhanced the material, and then reduced it to DVD resolution to show the folks at MGM what the DVD would look like. Comparing that with the prior results — it was like a brand-new movie. It has to do with whether you process at high-def or you process at 2K or 4K and then reduce to high-def. Certainly the best results we get — for HDTV broadcasting and future high-def DVDs — are on things we process at a higher resolution. The fine detail does migrate down to the next level, without question.

Are there plans to rerelease the Bond films theatrically?
I haven't heard anything, but I do know that when these are finished, we could have some stunning theatrical prints. The picture on You Only Live Twice is better than it has ever been. As digital cinema becomes more pervasive, the cost of distributing older films will be so low that you could have Thursday-night classics at your local theater. And they could pack them in.

Thanks to `JP` for the alert.

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