The Power of the Mac
The Macintosh has a profound impact on society. A great deal of the magazines you read, music you hear, movies and TV shows you watch and Internet sites you surf were created and edited on a Mac. It’s an invisible fabric that weaves its way through our daily lives. Always there, very rarely credited.
To paraphrase Obi-Wan: The Mac is what helps give the media its power. It’s an energy field created by all that use it. Its influence surrounds us and penetrates our perceptions. It binds all forms of communication together.
Ok, that was bit over the top, but you get the idea. Case in point: Bond, James Bond. The 21st installment in the Bond franchise is out in the theaters, and in the stores you can find the 20 prior films bundled in the James Bond Ultimate Collection. The complete set includes 40 DVDs, with every film completely re-mastered and tons of extras.
The original releases of Bond on DVD were fairly low quality; they simply scanned in the film. For the Ultimate Edition and in preparation for a future Blue-ray DVD release, DTS Digital Images was hired to re-master the films.
What does it take to re-master 20 movies (42 miles of film)?
It took 600 PowerMac G5s, working around the clock for two and a half years, using 700 Terabytes of storage. From the digitized frames (45MB each), they removed 37 million pieces of dirt and supposedly 74,000 hairs (that’s a lot of hair!). If they’d had Mac Pros, perhaps they could have cut that time in half.
So, the next time you’re surfing the Internet, reading a magazine or watching a re-mastered DVD, the power of the Mac surrounds us all, whether we realize it or not.
The James Bond Ultimate Edition:Volume 1
Movie Restoration:DTS Digital Images
James Bond 007:Licensed to Mac
Tags: Blue-ray, Entertainment, HD, Mac, Movies
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