Lowry Digital Selected for Restoration of NASA's Apollo 11 Footage; Facility Completes Highlight Sequences for 40th Anniversary Celebrations

BURBANK, Calif., July 16, 2009 - Lowry Digital has completed the initial phase of the restoration of footage sent back to Earth from Apollo 11, including man's first steps on the moon, as part of the 40th anniversary celebrations of the mission this month. NASA commissioned Lowry Digital to restore roughly two-and-a-half hours of material that astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin captured during their 1969 expedition. The preliminary restoration includes highlight sequences such as Armstrong's famous descent of the ladder and the planting of the American flag. The overall restoration is ongoing, and images will continue to be refined, with a planned completion in September. A sneak peek of the footage was presented today by NASA at a press conference in Washington, D.C., at the Newseum (http://www.nasa.gov/apollo40th).

The footage is being digitally restored utilizing the company's proprietary Lowry Process, which incorporates powerful imaging algorithms that have been fine-tuned over the course of more than 400 major feature film restorations. The technology uses temporal image processing science to reduce noise, improve detail, and to regain proper contrast, resolution and noise levels.

"Lowry Digital's unparalleled proprietary technology and experience in repairing moving images was essential to achieving NASA's goals for the restoration," says Lowry Digital COO Mike Inchalik. "Given that the original recordings did not survive, our ability to recover picture detail and eliminate increased noise and other artifacts introduced later was crucial. The disparate source elements each had their own unique issues, and we developed new tools to address them."

The images entrusted to Lowry Digital were processed by television scan converters located at NASA's tracking sites. The materials were gathered from a wide variety of sources. Part of Lowry Digital's challenge was to untangle the knot of formats, frame rates and resolutions.

"We're delighted by the progress we've seen so far, and all of us at NASA are excited by the possibilities that Lowry Digital's technology is bringing to the restoration of this historic event," says Richard Nafzger, an engineer at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., who oversaw television processing at the ground tracking sites during Apollo 11.

The team at Lowry Digital also developed a number of specifically tailored solutions to address to the unique problems of the Apollo 11 images. Some issues were introduced in the original photography; others in the transmission and recordings. Further flaws were introduced in the translation to other formats and media, and still others are the result of the media aging.

The project is also historically resonant in that company founder John Lowry worked with NASA back in the 1970s to improve images as they were sent back live from the Apollo 16 and 17 missions. The ideas and methods used then formed the seed that grew into The Lowry Process.

"This work for NASA represents the first real effort to apply Lowry Digital's proprietary image processing technology and repair tools outside the entertainment space," adds Inchalik. "The underlying science that John Lowry first invented is now so much more advanced at Lowry Digital, and it applies just as well to the scientific, medical, security and military fields. We're excited by those opportunities."

Lowry Digital is delivering the restored images in HD format to NASA. For more information, and a detailed list of the initial sequences being restored by Lowry Digital, visit www.lowrydigital.com.