Reliance Adag-owned firm restoring 1969 moon landing pictures

An Indian- owned company has played a crucial role in restoring visuals of the historic moon landing of 1969. The restored tapes, which were unveiled a few hours ago by NASA, were the product of Lowry Digital, part of Adlabs Films Ltd, owned by the Reliance Anil Dhirubhai Ambani Group.

The original, high-resolution images of the moon landing were lost when US space agency NASA accidentally reused the tapes during a shortage in the 1970s and 1980s.

The restoration was done on the compressed signal sent to Mission Control in Houston from three ground receiving stations in California and Australia. Lawry used four  video sources to enhance the images — news originals from the broadcaster CBS, kinescopes from the National Archives, a video from Australia containing part of the transmission of the original moon video, and camera shots on a TV monitor.

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," Adlabs, the parent company of Lowry, said.

"The preliminary restoration includes highlight sequences such as Armstrong’s famous descent from the ladder and the planting of the American flag on the moon. The overall restoration is ongoing, and images will continue to be refined, with a planned completion in September," the company said.

Among the new details that have emerged are mission commander Neil Armstrong's face visor, which was too fuzzy to be seen in the original. The new video shows his visor, complete with a reflection in it.

The total estimated cost of the restoration is expected to be around $230,000 and was started only three weeks ago. It was estimated to be only 40% complete when the images were revealed on the 40th anniversary of the landing in the US.

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. Lowry has so far restored around 400 major feature films and it tries to reduce noise, improve detail, and to regain proper contrast, resolution and noise levels.

“Given that the original recordings did not survive, our ability to recover picture detail and eliminate increased noise and other artefacts introduced later was crucial. The disparate source elements each had their own unique issues, and we developed new tools to address them,” said Lowry Digital COO, Mike Inchalik.

Some issues with images 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 a result of the media ageing. 

Interestingly, Lowry 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 later grew into The Lowry Process.