FRAMING THE FUTURE; EDS THINKS BIG IN FILM FORAY : RE-RELEASED MAJOR FILMS.Byline: Dave McNary Daily News Staff Writer With little fanfare over the past three years, computer-management giant Electronic Data Systems Corp. has become a significant player in Hollywood's booming post-production business. EDS (Electronic Data Systems, Plano, TX, www.eds.com) Founded in 1962 by H. Ross Perot (independent candidate for the President of the U.S. in 1992), EDS is the largest outsourcing and data processing services organization in the country. Digital Studios, with 175 employees in a North Hollywood office building near Universal Studios, is now the world's largest digital restoration facility. It has announced that monthly revenues in 1997 have increased by more than 300 percent over the same periods last year, though it has not disclosed specific numbers. ``When EDS considered moving into post-production, it was with the expectation that it could eventually become a $1 billion-a-year business for us,'' said Greg Granello, president of the operation. ``That could happen in five to eight years, although that's very indefinite INDEFINITE. That which is undefined; uncertain. INDEFINITE, NUMBER. A number which may be increased or diminished at pleasure. 2. When a corporation is composed of an indefinite number of persons, any number of them consisting of a majority of those and depends on a lot of things.'' Dallas-based EDS, which had 1996 sales of $14.4 billion, jumped into the highly fragmented frag·ment n. 1. A small part broken off or detached. 2. An incomplete or isolated portion; a bit: overheard fragments of their conversation; extant fragments of an old manuscript. 3. world of post-production in early 1995 when it bought Varitel Video and started offering editing and visual effects services. It has been moving since then to not only position itself as a ``one-stop shop'' for studios' post-production needs but also as a facility offering technologies not available elsewhere. The move into a new area of business made sense, according to according to prep. 1. As stated or indicated by; on the authority of: according to historians. 2. In keeping with: according to instructions. 3. Granello, because there is no standard technology for post-production work, or as he puts it: ``There's no `Intel Inside.' '' Instead, companies like EDS, Burbank-based Four Media Co., Los Angeles-based Todd-AO and dozens of other ``post houses'' create proprietary technology for producers to put the finishing touches finishing touches finish npl the finishing touches → der letzte Schliff finishing touches npl → ultimi ritocchi mpl on movies and TV programs or formatting them for use in foreign markets. Additionally, Granello notes, EDS already had a strong background in areas that are increasingly important in post-production work such as systems integration, networking, project management, licensing and royalties. ``We know how to move information from one platform to another,'' he said. EDS' move into high-speed technical work comes amid soaring demand for entertainment programming. One-stop shops One-Stop Shop A company or a location that offers a multitude of services to a client or a customer. The idea is to provide convenient and efficient service and also to create the opportunity for the company to sell more products to clients and customers. that can deliver on their promises at competitive prices have a strong outlook, according to Stewart Halpern, an analyst with Furman Selz. ``We see the post-production industry as a pretty solid growth business with 10 to 15 percent annual growth,'' Halpern said. ``You can see additional growth from picking up market share from niche players who don't offer services or don't have state-of-the-art technology. ``Fundamentally, the industry is being driven by continued growth in worldwide demand and by more programming being transferred to digital formats for creation, storage and distribution.'' For example, EDS signed a deal in April with Chatsworth-based Image Entertainment to provide technical services on the highly touted digital versatile disc digital versatile disc or digital video disc (DVD), a small plastic disc used for the storage of digital data. The successor media to the compact disc (CD), a DVD can have as much as 26 times the storage capacity of a CD. format. ``DVD DVD: see digital versatile disc. DVD in full digital video disc or digital versatile disc Type of optical disc. The DVD represents the second generation of compact-disc (CD) technology. is still a small part of our work, but demand has been surprisingly strong,'' Granello said. ``Right now, we can't meet all our orders.'' EDS also has made a major investment in film restoration, spending more than $8 million to buy eight Quantel Domino film-optical composition machines. The facility has completed work on digitally restoring three movies for an unnamed studio to be re-released into the domestic market, much like the ``Star Wars'' trilogy A company founded in 1979 by Gene Amdahl to commercialize wafer scale integration and build supercomputers. It raised a quarter of a billion dollars, the largest startup funding in history, but could not create its 2.5" superchip. earlier this year. It is negotiating with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to restore the 1968 animated movie ``Yellow Submarine'' for re-release. The revamped ``Star Wars'' trilogy, featuring extensive new and upgraded footage, brought in nearly $250 million at the domestic box office, Granello noted. ``Once `Star Wars' came out again, all the other studios started asking themselves, what do I have in my library that can be released like that?'' EDS' new techniques will: eliminate the ``crawl'' of colors not of the white race; - commonly meaning, esp. in the United States, of negro blood, pure or mixed. See also: Color from frame to frame; improve resolution by seeking out the hard and soft edges of images; improve each frame's focus; and simulate simulate - simulation camera movement in special-effects shots, which are normally rendered without any movement. ``If the camera jiggles at the moment of an explosion, it's much more realistic,'' Granello said. How good is the restored product? ``Better than perfect,'' replies Granello. ``We can solve problems in the digital world that filmmakers usually regard as vagaries of film.'' For example, EDS contends it has worked out the problem of ``flutter Flutter (aeronautics) An aeroelastic self-excited vibration with a sustained or divergent amplitude, which occurs when a structure is placed in a flow of sufficiently high velocity. Flutter is an instability that can be extremely violent. ,'' or differing light intensity, by normalizing the light levels on a frame-by-frame basis. All this work is not occurring in a vacuum. Granello believes audiences worldwide are becoming less tolerant of programming with visual flaws and expects that trend to continue with the appearance of new formats like high-definition TV See HDTV. . EDS came into the entertainment business by accident. It was owed millions of dollars by Spectravision, which had fallen into bankruptcy bankruptcy, in law, settlement of the liabilities of a person or organization wholly or partially unable to meet financial obligations. The purposes are to distribute, through a court-appointed receiver, the bankrupt's assets equitably among creditors and, in most because its technology for delivering movies on demand to hotel rooms did not work, so EDS engineers designed a functioning system under Granello's guidance. ``It was a microcosm mi·cro·cosm n. A small, representative system having analogies to a larger system in constitution, configuration, or development: "He sees the auto industry as a microcosm of the U.S. of what we plan to do in the entertainment industry on a much grander scale,'' he said. A growing number of films have been restored and re-released in recent years ``Vertigo'' ``Lawrence of Arabia'' ``Star Wars'' ``The Empire Strikes Back'' ``Return of the Jedi'' ``Taxi Driver'' ``The Godfather'' ``Das Boot'' ``Dirty Dancing'' ``Spartacus'' ``Picnic'' ``Stairway stairway or staircase Series or flight of steps that provides a means of moving from one level to another. The earliest stairways seem to have been built with walls on both sides, as in Egyptian pylons dating from the 2nd millennium BC. to Heaven'' ``Blade Runner'' ``The Wild Bunch'' ``My Fair Lady'' ``Contempt'' ``Mr. Smith Goes to Washington'' ``Woodstock'' ``Giant'' ``Heavy Metal'' ``El Cid'' ``Dr. Zhivago'' Possible future re-releases ``Close Encounters of the Third Kind'' ``2001'' ``Grease'' ``A Clockwork Orange'' ``Yellow Submarine'' CAPTION(S): 4 Photos, Box Photo: (1--Color) EDS Digital Studios President Greg Granello is at the helm of an aggressive film post-production business. (2) EDS Digital Studios President Greg Granello believes business could eventually reach $1 billion a year. Shaun Dyer/Special to the Daily News (3--Color) No caption (``Spartacus'') (4--Color) No caption (``Vertigo'') Box: Re-released major films |
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