Giving colour to the past

HP and Warner Bros. Studios announced a broad, strategic partnership to enhance the quality, post-production and distribution of entertainment content. Initially, the companies will focus on two key projects:

- Digital restoration: The companies will pool their collective expertise in image processing to develop and deploy new techniques that will digitally restore the image quality of many of the world's treasured and classic motion pictures and television shows. The new digital restoration effort will combine Warner Bros. Studios' proprietary software – successfully used to restore the classic films "Singin' in the Rain", "Robin Hood" and "Meet Me in St. Louis" – with HP's industry-leading image, colour and data management technologies and servers, software and storage systems. As a result, Warner Bros. Studios will now be able to increase the number and the quality of films that are restored and released per year.

- Digital post-production – HP and Warner Bros. Studios are teaming to create a new set of tools and infrastructure to build a post-production studio of the future. This new system will provide creative artists with enhanced flexibility and power throughout the digital post-production process, while preserving the resolution and image quality that has historically only been possible with traditional film-based techniques. As part of this project, HP and Warner Bros. Studios will define and develop tools to manage and manipulate the hundreds of terabytes of data that are needed to ensure content quality meets or exceeds the historical quality of 35mm film.

Warner Bros. Studios' feature film productions and high-definition television shows will be the first wave of digital entertainment content used to test and build the post-production studio of the future.

HP and DreamWorks also announced a significant expansion of their alliance by unveiling two innovative, new technologies that will shape the future of digital filmmaking:

- Utility Rendering Service (URS) -- Developed by HP in close collaboration with DreamWorks, URS addresses a very real and expensive problem in creating digital animation. Based on HP's Utility Data Center technology, URS provides a simple, flexible and scalable solution to manage the enormous computational power required to render high-quality film animation. In the process of rendering "Shrek 2," URS provided DreamWorks with 50 percent more capacity from a remote, pooled set of computing resources when it needed it most, without having to purchase additional computing resources.

- Virtual Studio Collaboration (VSC) – HP also partnered with DreamWorks to launch the VSC system, which uses movie-making techniques – lighting, sound design and visual effects – to create a virtual collaboration environment for producers, directors and animators working in different locations around the world. Using HP software and DreamWorks' high-resolution imaging technology, VSC links all creative elements together, enabling real-time, lifelike communication and the efficient exchange of storyboarding, content review, editing, creative consulting and other vital production information.

HP is partnering with DreamWorks to create the next generation of its VSC solution and plans to make it available to other studios and industries.