Pfclean Price

[Jan Dominquez]

Thisnew collaborative workgroup product enables restoration facilities to scale the size of their operations according to their workload, and introduces pricing and rental structures according to their budgets.

PFMill is a single software product, with a simple producer interface, which provides a single point for project updates, administration, and resource management. It runs on one workstation, which hosts all support hardware and services.

With the introduction of this new technology, The Pixel Farm has created flexible multi-seat pricing and rental options that directly reflect the technical and budgetary challenges in the archive restoration market.

PFMill offers easy facility expansion by offering owners the option to either purchase or rent additional restoration clients. The base price includes three clients, a producer seat plus all associated infrastructure products, and can be expanded to a total of 10 clients as required.

In software-only form, PFMill supports OSX and Windows variants of OS. However, a PFMill System is also available as part of The Pixel Farm's Turnkey Systems range, in which guise it can be scaled for different performance and workload requirements.

PF Clean is a resolution-independent, clean-up and remastering system for moving-image data, noted for delivering the highest-quality results at speed. Facilities worldwide have adopted PF Clean for its vast toolset, ease-of-use, productivity, and ability to repair even the most badly damaged material.

PFSilo is The Pixel Farm's collaborative workflow management system, designed for use with the comprehensive DI and restoration toolset of PFClean. PFSilo enables teams of restoration artists to work on single or multiple feature film projects simultaneously. Simple-to-administer project management and asset-handling tools, let users manage workflow, deadlines and deliverables, and improve productivity.

OK, so since it seems like I'll be working with an increasing number of film-based sources, I'd really like to learn how to do film cleanup and I don't even know where to begin. What I want is basic denoising for when I need to match grain-levels to other sources but mainly, I need a way, to automatically remove dirt and spots - it doesn't really matter, if it mistakenly erases other details, like stars and stuff like that, since I would then only utilize the cleaned up version for manual cleanup in After Effects.

Doing this kind of thing in After Effects is less than ideal, since it was never made for film-restoration and I also tried PF Clean and I just couldn't get it to work but I couldn't afford the full version of PF Clean anyway, so I'd really like to learn how to do by myself what Laserschwert has been doing for me so far, so that I don't have to bother him with it. So I guess my question really is how to do this sort of thing in Avisynth.

Before moving on to Avisynth suggestions, I'd like to ask: Do you know that The Pixel Farm is selling PFClean at a reduced "education discount" rate? It's $167 USD. I don't know if this will make it any more affordable for you, but I figure it's worth mentioning.

I still couldn't currently afford it for that price but even if I could, like I said, I tried it and couldn't get it to work - It got really frustrating after hours of unsuccessfully trying to get it to do anything at all.

I've no idea how useful this is for 35mm, but this Doom9 thread has a bunch of ideas for Avisynth film restoration (admittedly assuming you're using 8mm, but perhaps some techniques are transferable).

Plus it seems that that guy's script doesn't do the main thing that I need and that is removing spots and dirt. And I don't need color correction, or sharpening or anything like that - I can do all that easier with AE, so the only thing of interest from that script is the stabilization but for me that script is far too complex to be able to extract just the stabilization part from it.

For stabilizing, I use the Virtualdub filter called Deshaker. Actually I use it a LOT, on both old film and old video. It's slow, but it really does a nice job. There are a lot of arcane settings, so if you have any questions on how to use it, or what settings I use for different situations, feel free to ask.

Yeah, I did. The problem is, it still gets thrown by the action in the shot, as tries to get the moving objects to stay stable, because it was designed for stabilizing camera moves. Plus there is actually very little tuning that you can do.

In my opinion, a motion compensated dfttest is the best denoiser at the moment. It requires dfttest and mvtools2 if I recall correctly. Paste this into the bottom of any script and it should work as long as you have the dfttest and mvtools2 installed and autoloaded in the plugin directory.

Fred's 8mm script is probably the best way to do automated dirt cleanup. You can disable almost any portion of the script and use only what you want. He's got it all laid out in the appropriate order so you don't do any processing out of order. What method did Laserschwert use? That seemed to work really well.

Deshaker has a ton of tunable settings. I sometimes set the maximum movement to a very small number, and I also limit the motion sensing area to a portion of the screen that I know doesn't have any action in it.

FWIW: I spoke with the author of deshaker sometime back regarding fixing the gate weave in the GOUT. His assessment (after I sent him a sample) was that another tool would probably be best to deal with the kind of slight subpixel motion that gate weave introduces.

Yeah, I learned the hard way, that the order in which you do things is very important - e.g. you definitely want to do any despotting before doing any denoising, because when I had Laserschwert do the denoising on the clips first and then I went in and manually painted out the spots, all the spots now stayed for 3-5 frames instead of one, which was a pain in the ass to paint out manually and I imagine, that it would totally throw any automatic despotter.

Thanks for all the suggestions guys. I currently don't have any of the new clips yet, so I think I will start experimenting with this, once I get some - I just wanted to get ahead of it.

Adding to this I must say that my denoising is possible the most lazy thing imaginable, as I simply use MC_Spuds at it's default setting (so no further parameters). Note that the filter needs a YV12 source, so you have to use "ConvertToYV12" before this filter, and "ConvertToRGB24" after it.

I just love how much detail it keeps, but as Harmy pointed out, despotting beforehand is highly recommended. Unfortunately this is very difficult do to when dealing with stuff like starfields, as those are bound to be reduced by a fair amount of stars in the process.

For shorter shots it's advisable to remove the biggest dirt pieces manually. After Effects' clone brush is very cool in that it allows the offset for the clone brush to not only be set as x and y postions, but also as frame offsets. So usually I just leave the position offset at 0,0 and the frame offset at -1 or +1 (depending on which end of the clip I'm working on). By that I can just stamp the same area from one frame earlier (or later) onto a piece of dirt, which is usually close enough in brightness and coloring to work.

The demo at NAB was both impressive and concerning. They had before and after clips that were vastly improved, but not perfect. It seemed like either they could have gone a little further with the fixes or there were short comings. It seemed like stuff they had cleaned up would be harder to fix than the dirt that was still in the cleaned clips.

The posted prices at NAB for DaVinci Revival software is US$1495. DaVinci Revival Pro software is US$9995. Always a bit nervous to type prices for fear of a typo. Revival is the manual toolset and Revival Pro is the full automatic and interactive product.

What about the compatibility of Resolve and Revival in terms of exchanging material/seguences?

Can Revival also be clustered via infiniband? If so, is there a further license fee involved? What video I/O boards are currently supported?

The industrial grade film restoration application space is not an overly occupied one. You can count the number of these software vendors on your fingers. Some are well known and well entrenched in the industry, yet others are relative new comers attempting to take a piece of the market pie in this narrow niche. Did I say the tools are expensive? The least expensive with a common set of filters costs $3000 and goes up from there. Not your average pricing for the everyday Joe to buy into. Packages range from software only to combined hardware/software systems bound together to yield the best efficiency and results.

Most old film regardless of its gauge, suffers from one or more effects of poor processing, bad handling and long term environmental stresses. The larger 35mm to 70mm film sizes has and continues to have the benefit of professional restoration services due to the availability of industrial level financing driven by the urgency to preserve for historical reasons. On the other hand the smaller amateur gauges like 8mm and Super 8 being a consumer gauge have been and are largely ignored. Cost being the out of reach factor.

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