Lawrence of Arabia 50th Anniversary - October 4 (US)

[Dread_Pirate_Mel]

NY Times has a long article about the meticulous transfer/repair of the original negative to 8K digital format.

But the film holds up not only for its historical parallels but also because it’s thrilling and, in its present incarnation, it looks breathtaking.

The key is that this is a 4K digital restoration. When a machine called the Imagica EX scans across each frame of a film’s negative, it creates a digitally encoded replica that consists of 4,000 (actually, 4,096) pixels on each horizontal line. Multiplied by the 2,160 pixels on each vertical line, this makes for a total of 8.8 million pixels per frame.

By comparison, high-definition TV broadcasts and Blu-ray Discs are made from scans of 2.2 million pixels per frame. In other words, 4K images have four times as much detail and resolution as HD or Blu-ray.

In a connect-the-dots diagram, the more dots there are, the more detailed the resulting image. Similarly, in digital scanning, the more pixels there are, the more that image resembles the actual film. The significance is this: The 8.8 million pixels in a 4K scan are enough to reproduce all the visual information in a frame of 35 mm film — every detail of the image, the full dynamic range of bright to dark, the entire spectrum of colors, even the sheen of “grain” that distinguishes film from video. (“Lawrence of Arabia” was shot in 65 millimeter — nearly twice the width of a 35-millimeter frame — so its negative had to be scanned in 8K, creating 8,192 pixels across each line. But it is still referred to as a 4K scan because it has the same density of pixels, the same resolution across 65 millimeters that 4K has across 35 millimeters.)

This was a laborious process. The tech crew, headed by Grover Crisp, Sony’s executive vice president for asset management and film restoration, spent three months in 2009 simply inspecting the negative, one frame at a time (more than 320,000 frames in all), repairing rips and tears, just so it could run through a scanner without breaking.