KEY POINTS:
BEVERLY HILLS - Technology to preserve digital movies on black and white film and environmentally friendly sound tracks got awards at the Oscars ceremony for scientific achievement on Saturday night, but the favourite technical accomplishment was a juggler performing to Beatles music.
Comedian Chris Bliss' juggling, which sped up and slowed with the music, had researchers whooping with approval, while ceremony hostess and movie star Maggie Gyllenhaal won the second-biggest round of applause for correctly pronouncing the word "densitometer."
The 2006 Scientific and Technical Awards from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is the year's premiere ceremony for the movie industry's scientists and takes place a few weeks before the Academy's Oscars ceremony.
This year preserving the fruits of rapidly changing technology was a theme as three teams who aim to save digital movies for centuries were recognised.
"You have any floppy disks?" Technicolor Digital Intermediates' Joshua Pines asked over dinner to illustrate how the pace of advancement means a technology that is fresh one day may be unusable in few decades. The once ubiquitous personal computer disks are tough to find - and drives to read them are becoming scarce. The same is true for professional systems.
Pines and Chris Kutcka won an award for a process to separate colour digital images into three primary-colour streams, each of which is stored on archival black and white film which lasts centuries and can be scanned and recombined even if the digital system that created the original is lost.
Groups from E-Film and Pacific Title and Art Studio also got awards for preservation science.
Awards for a densitometer, which measures the quality of sound tracks, a nontoxic way to put sound tracks on film, wireless remote controls to focus cameras and visual effects systems used in scenes such as a sea monster plucking a sailor off a ship in one of Walt Disney Co's "Pirates of the Caribbean" movies also received awards.
Oscars statues will be handed out to movie stars before hundreds of millions of television viewers on Feb. 25, but some recipients said that their own scientific "geeky" community's praise was more meaningful - to them, at least.
As one recipient put it, "An award like this is a rare and beautiful thing. An award like this to a geek is the square of that."
- REUTERS
