Lowry Digital worked with several video sources to produce the footage, working from low-quality images such as television broadcast video and 8mm film shot on a handheld camera that was pointed at the monitor at NASA's Honeysuckle Creek tracking station in Australia. The newly released Apollo 11 video was enhanced by removing artifacts like noise, flickering, darkened image corners, blurs and smears, enabling it to regain proper contrast and improved resolution.

Enhancing each frame of the video on a CPU-only system would have taken Lowry Digital between 20 to 45 minutes to complete. Tesla GPUs deliver a 100-times boost in performance, cutting the restoration time for a single frame to seconds. The final Apollo 11 video will feature two and half hours of HD video.

"Lowry Digital's restoration process has brought out details in the Apollo 11 videos that were never visible before," said Andy Keane, general manager of the Tesla business unit at Nvidia. "You can now see the faces of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin behind their visors, the stars on the U.S. flag when it is being raised and amazing details of the moon surface. We're proud that Nvidia has made such an important contribution to this historic project."

The Lowry Process for digital restoration incorporates powerful image processing algorithms that have been fine-tuned during film restoration of more than 400 feature films, including classics such as Casablanca and Doctor Zhivago. The company also provides proprietary image processing services for new productions as utilized on The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Lowry Digital is continuing the restoration project of NASA's video archive of the moon landings and is scheduled to complete the work in September.

More Information at www.nvidia.com/cuda. Image and Videos Courtesy of NASA. Video Post-Production: 3Dup.com