"Lawrence of Arabia," Mended, Returns to Screen and Blu-ray NO studio today would make a film like "Lawrence of Arabia" - 227 minutes long, featuring a cast of hundreds riding camels through the desert, shot on location (there were no computer graphics in 1962). Yet Sony Pictures" new 50th-anniversary restoration - playing at the New York Film Festival on Sunday and in more than 600 theaters nationwide starting Thursday - seems fresh and modern, in its political themes and its stunning visual clarity. Columbia Pictures Anthony Quinn, Peter O'Toole and Omar Sharif in "Lawrence of Arabia," which has undergone a 50th-anniversary digital restoration. The film's real-life hero, T. E. Lawrence (played by Peter O'Toole), was a flamboyant British officer who gained fame during World War I for leading a gaggle of Bedouin tribesmen in guerrilla assaults on their Turkish occupiers, paving the way for the Ottoman Empire's downfall. In the process, he came to see himself as a demigod, destined to unite the Arab people and "give" them freedom - an illusion crushed by big-power politics and the Arabs" own tribal rivalries: a mix that has thwarted dreams for the region ever since, from Gamal Abdel Nasser's pan-Arabism to George W. Bush's cakewalk for democracy in Iraq. Lawrence figured in the debate over our own recent tangles with insurgents, in Afghanistan and Iraq. His memoir, "Seven Pillars of Wisdom," was tapped both by the United States Army's counterinsurgency strategists and by skeptics, who quoted Lawrence's warning about wars against rebellions _ "messy and slow, like eating soup with a knife" - though the enthusiasts took the pronouncement as a challenge. But the film holds up not only for its historical parallels but also because it's thrilling and, in its present incarnation, it looks breathtaking. The key is that this is a 4K digital restoration. When a machine called the Imagica EX scans across each frame of a film's negative, it creates a digitally encoded replica that consists of 4,000 (actually, 4,096) pixels on each horizontal line. Multiplied by the 2,160 pixels on each vertical line, this makes for a total of 8.8 million pixels per frame. By comparison, high-definition TV broadcasts and Blu-ray Discs are made from scans of 2.2 million pixels per frame. In other words, 4K images have four times as much detail and resolution as HD or Blu-ray. In a connect-the-dots diagram, the more dots there are, the more detailed the resulting image. Similarly, in digital scanning, the more pixels there are, the more that image resembles the actual film. The significance is this: The 8.8 million pixels in a 4K scan are enough to reproduce all the visual information in a frame of 35 mm film - every detail of the image, the full dynamic range of bright to dark, the entire spectrum of colors, even the sheen of "grain" that distinguishes film from video. ("Lawrence of Arabia" was shot in 65 millimeter - nearly twice the width of a 35-millimeter frame - so its negative had to be scanned in 8K, creating 8,192 pixels across each line. But it is still referred to as a 4K scan because it has the same density of pixels, the same resolution across 65 millimeters that 4K has across 35 millimeters.) This was a laborious process. The tech crew, headed by Grover Crisp, Sony's executive vice president for asset management and film restoration, spent three months in 2009 simply inspecting the negative, one frame at a time (more than 320,000 frames in all), repairing rips and tears, just so it could run through a scanner without breaking. The 8K scanning, again one frame at a time, consumed the first half of 2010. Then they looked at the result. "It was amazingly more detailed and sharp," Mr. Crisp recalled in a phone interview. That's the blessing of 4K. The curse is that it exposes a lot more flaws" - dirt, scratches, faded colors and more. When "Lawrence" was last restored, in 1988, some of these flaws could be disguised by "wetgate printing," a process of dousing the print in a special solution. But the new restoration has no prints. The film's digital data are stored on a hard drive, about the size of an old videocassette, which is inserted into a 4K digital projector. In short, the problems would now have to be fixed. Luckily, there have been dramatic advances in digital-restoration technology in just the last few years. New software can erase scratches, clean dirt and modify contrast and colors not just frame by frame but pixel by pixel. In the old days (circa 2006), if you wanted to brighten the desert sand in one scene because it was too dark, you'd have to brighten the sky too. Now you can brighten the sand - or even a few grains of the sand - while leaving everything else alone. And in those days there was a limited palette for restoring faded colors. Today's digital palettes are much vaster. In one sense, this restored "Lawrence" might look better than the original. Because of the film stock's exposure to the desert's heat, some of its photochemical emulsion dried and cracked, resulting in vertical fissures. "Some were just a few pixels wide," Mr. Crisp said, "but some scenes had hundreds of them, filling as much as one-eighth of the frame."