The New York Times > Movies > 600 Macs, 4,000 Lines, One Giant Leap for DVD’s
This is interesting. The movie studios are taking advantage of the technology — high-end scanners, displays, and high-powered but affordable computers — to recapture the quality of old films. The DVDs produced are excellent:
The scenes look as brilliant as anything I’ve seen on a video disc — and better than any video of a color movie that was shot 35 to 40 years ago. Colors are saturated and natural. Gardens have dozens of shades of green. Flesh tones are uncannily lifelike. Shadows look like shadows, not gray blots. Motions are smooth, not jumpy.
I realize the studios are going to sell these, likely for a premium, and indulge in all kinds of copy-protection/DRM hijinks: to some degree, I’m OK with that, if they make an effort to produce good products. I just wish the music cartel — with it’s much deeper back catalog — would do something similar: take old master materials, restore and record them, and let us hear them. I expect the fees paid to lawyers and process servers would have paid for a lot of this, and in turn generated enough revenue to do some more.