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 June 1, 2005 Snow Removal on the Moon I noticed a news item recently reporting that DTS -- the digital-surround folks -- had acquired Lowry Digital Images, founded by John Lowry. LDI’s main stock in trade has been meticulous restorations of classic films for the purpose of making premium DVDs and high-definition transfers for digital broadcast. A fascinating interview with John Lowry appeared in the November 2004 issue of Sound & Vision magazine, detailing how he had approached the revitalization of everything from Casablanca and Citizen Kane to the original Star Wars trilogy and the early James Bond flicks. The interview is available on the magazine’s website. When I read that story, it didn’t immediately occur to me that I had encountered John Lowry before, more than 30 years ago, when he ran a Toronto company called Image Transform Inc. Much of its work was a forerunner of what Lowry has been doing recently, but perhaps his most notable achievement in those days was taking the grainy television images sent by the Apollo astronauts from the moon and turning them into broadcast-quality images. I recall watching a baseball game in those days, relayed from a city about 200 miles away, and noting how much better were the Lowry-enhanced pictures from the moon, hundreds of thousands of miles away. I visited Lowry shortly after the Apollo missions came to an end, and published a profile of him and his work in the January 1973 edition of Electron magazine, the predecessor of AudioScene Canada. Here are some excerpts from that story: "Somehow you never expect to meet a real inventor. A Development Officer, yes. A Director of Research, certainly. A New Product Engineer, of course. But an inventor . . . "The term seems more appropriate to the heyday of Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell than today, when most major developments are the handiwork of scientific teams working for large corporations. "And yet, Toronto’s John Lowry is a genuine inventor of the old school. As president of a company called Image Transform Inc., he has developed a system for taking a less-than-perfect television signal, removing most of the noise from it, improving the color and horizontal resolution, and coming up with a very much better picture. . . . "Like many top people in the video world, John Lowry is an alumnus of the [Canadian Broadcasting Corporation]. After a number of years there, during which he rose from stagehand to producer/director, he joined . . . a private television production house in Toronto, where he worked on the development of electronic editing systems for videotape. "For the past few years, Lowry has been working in film production. " ‘I found that a lot of techniques we developed . . . for electronic editing were, in fact, remarkably parallel to some of the things that were being done with motion picture film 30 years before. I think there has been a tremendous lack of communication between the two media.’ "Lowry is doing as much as anyone to bridge the gap. Along with many others in film production, his recent concern has been to find a practicable way to employ the extremely sophisticated equipment in the better TV production centers for the making of feature films. . . . " ‘We placed our emphasis in the whole system on processing the electronic signals to make them more suitable. One of the major results was our noise reduction system, which turns out to be unique. We are reducing the noise in the video signal by, subjectively, about 75 to 80%.’ "Probably the most visible application of the technique so far has been in the coverage of the last two Apollo space flights, when the television signals from the moon were processed by Image Transform before being telecast. " ‘Before the Apollo 16 program, we made a bit of film from the Apollo 15 video, with the thought that our noise reduction system should be able to do a lot for their kind of problem. I took the film to Col. McDivett of NASA [the National Aeronautics and Space Administration], who was in charge of the Apollo program. I went in for a 15-minute screening, and I was there for a day and a half. They could see detail on the film that they hadn’t seen on their television signals. " ‘Besides reducing the noise, we were able to do a great deal in terms of "sharpening" the picture and cleaning up the color. . . .’ "The Apollo program is now at an end; so, for the time being, Image Transform will restrict its activities to providing a service to the film industry from its plant in North Hollywood, California. In its one year of existence, the company has become the leader in the field of tape-to-film transfer, according to Lowry. "At present, the system is capable of producing 16mm film from videotape that is as good as any 16mm film. Lowry expects that, within a year, he will be able to say the same thing of 35mm film. Another area in which development work is proceeding is a system whereby original film can be transferred to tape, edited, processed, and re-transferred to film with better quality than the original. . . . "What motivates a man of such innovative talents? ‘I’m not interested in getting involved in anything unless I can make money,’ says Lowry. ‘There’s only one objective, and it isn’t to build some beautiful technical device. I’ve got to make money, because if I don’t make money on one project, I haven’t got the money to do the next.’ "Move over, Thomas Edison." ...Ian G. Masters
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