OTHER TECH

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

The picture quality of the previous DVD releases was disappointing.These are stunning - they'll blow your socks off. We're doing all 20 James Bond movies - nine with 4K scanning, the others in high-definition.

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.

The detail in Casablanca was much more striking than on North by Northwest. Was this due to different scanning resolutions?We did Casablanca at 2K. That led to a significantly better result than North by Northwest, which was done at standard-definition .

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.

Is there a classic film you'd love to get your hands on?Well, I'd love to do The Wizard of Oz , just because it's a lovely film and it needs a lot of work.

But to a lot of people, it already looks gorgeous. The DVD is often used as a demonstration disc in showrooms.I'd take it somewhere else. People are much more aware of quality now and of what is needed. DVD did wonders for that.

I was watching a laserdisc of The Bandwagon the other night, and I couldn't believe how awful it looked.And eight or ten years ago we thought laserdiscs were beautiful, so you get a whole new perspective. DVD has raised the bar, and now HDTV broadcasting and the high-def DVDs that are coming in the next year or so - certainly by the end of 2005 - will really raise the bar on overall sensitivity to image quality, because the picture has five times the detail of DVD.

I've had a number of studios come to me in the past month saying, "We did this high-def transfer 2 1/2 years ago, but we're not too happy with the quality now and are concerned about whether it will be good enough for high-def DVD." These are recent high-def transfers, and they're already saying that we need to take another look.

Even with DVD, you sometimes see things, like an actor's makeup, that weren't meant to be seen. Is higher resolution always better?We just did Mary Poppins [due out on DVD in December] and that's a case where, when you clean it up properly, you can see some of the wires. It's the same as when you can see the shadow from a boom mike. But we can go in and fix those things. One of the studios we work with is now taking the position that we've got to look at the intent rather than the result. Intent instead of saying, "Well this is the way it turned out and that's history, and that's the way it has to be." This opens up the possibility of eliminating things that interfere with the storytelling. And that, after all, is the purpose behind everything we're doing.