One of the most popular and influential films in the history of cinema returns to the silver screen with Lawrence of Arabia 50th Anniversary Event: Digitally Restored on Thursday, October 4 at 7:00 PM local time, with special matinees in select theaters.

Presented by NCM® Fathom Events and Sony Pictures Entertainment, the restoration of the Director’s Cut of the film was overseen by Grover Crisp, Sony Pictures Entertainment Executive Vice President Asset Management, Film Restoration & Digital Mastering and conducted with the latest digital imaging technology. The original 65mm camera negative was first scanned at 8K. The film then underwent a painstaking process of repairing and restoring problems inherent to the 50-year-old film elements. Finally, the film went through a 4K color grading and re-mastering process at Colorworks Sony Pictures Entertainments’ digital intermediate facility.

This special event features an exclusive introduction from Lawrence of Arabia star and Academy Award® nominee Omar Sharif, newsreel footage of the New York premiere, as well as footage of King Hussein visiting the film set. In addition, Academy Award® winning Director Martin Scorsese will talk about the over-arching themes of Lawrence of Arabia and its influence on other iconic films in a recent, exclusive never-before-seen interview.

Winner of seven Academy Awards®, including Best Picture of 1962, Lawrence of Arabia is considered one of the most timeless and essential motion picture masterpieces. The greatest achievement of its legendary, Oscar-winning director David Lean, the film has been honored as the No. 7 film on the American Film Institute’s (AFI) list of the “100 Greatest Movies of All Time.”

Don’t miss your chance to see this valiant desert classic for only one day and celebrate the release of the Lawrence of Arabia 50th Anniversary Collector’s Edition Blu-ray Gift Set available November 13, 2012.

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 special event features an exclusive introduction from Lawrence of Arabia star and Academy Award® nominee Omar Sharif, newsreel footage of the New York premiere, as well as footage of King Hussein visiting the film set. In addition, Academy Award® winning Director Martin Scorsese will talk about the over-arching themes of Lawrence of Arabia and its influence on other iconic films in a recent, exclusive never-before-seen interview.