Restoration Lead: Paul McGeoch Production: George Best: The Legacy Client: The Lost Film Facility In an exciting new project The Lost Film Facility restores some fascinating footage of the footballing legend and genius George Best to the public domain with the help of The Pixel Farm’s image clean up and restoration package PFClean. Thought to be lost, the footage features twenty 10 minute episodes of football ace, Best, imparting his knowledge and skill to youngsters by way of training sessions.  A truly enlightening glimpse of the man at the peak of his powers the footage will feature in a DVD tribute entitled ‘George Best: The Legacy’ which will include never before seen interviews from his friends and peers, and is scheduled to be released later this year. The recovered footage has had to undergo extensive restoration treatment to bring it back to flawless life however. Apart from the usual dust and light scratching one would expect from such archive material, there were sections of quite severe damage to sequences of frames, such as extended scaring, discolouring problems and misaligned frames. The Lost Film Facility, London, found that PFClean provided a complete solution for the entire restoration process. Filmed during the 1969/70 season, the footage features George Best in a series of exercises and drills aimed to help with skills and ability on the pitch. Best demonstrates to a collection of aspiring young footballers many techniques and skills such as chest control for attackers, the chip pass, trapping and moving, volleying for defenders, heading for defenders, swerving the ball, volleying at goal, and taking high crosses. Truly a pleasure to watch for any fan of the game, and a rare privilege indeed, to see probably the world’s greatest player demonstrate the great skills and easy charm which helped to make him famous, universally respected within the sport and so well liked by all who met him or shared a football pitch with him. Because the original Super16 mm film the programmes were shot on has been lost entirely, the production had to rely upon the archive Beta master tapes for the digital transfer, and resulting PAL resolution files, to begin the restoration and clean up process. The footage had suffered considerable damage over time so that much of it was littered with large dirt particles and scratches, and in some places the damage was so severe that entire frames had to be completely rebuilt. Orginal Frame Restored Frame Producer at The Lost Film Facility, Paul McGeoch says that PFClean was able to identify and correct up to 99% of dirt problems automatically, while more serious problems with the footage could be fixed with relative ease using the application’s comprehensive toolset. “On occasion at the start or end of a clip the ‘fix frame’ tool did not always repair all of the damage, however using it together with the ‘clone’ and ‘repair’ paint tools would always provide a great result”, says McGeoch. In fact the range of resolution independent, non-destructive tools available in this truly remarkable application means that any damage can be repaired quickly and efficiently, even entire frame replacement. Apart from automatic dust and scratch detection and fix across any colour channel combination, together with de-flicker, noise, grain and many other adjustment controls PFClean also features a real-time float paint system which is armed with a number of brush tools. These make repairs intelligently using The Pixel Farm’s own motion estimation algorithms. Indeed the entire application is built around The Pixel Farm’s own optical flow and real time playback technologies, which allows for all pixel information to be stored via a per frame meta data map and also enables real time 2K playback respectively. What this means in the real world is that fixes made, right down to individual paint effects strokes are kept as meta data which can be utilised later on to make modifications including any number of non sequential undos, so that total control is maintained throughout the restoration and cleaning process. Orginal Frame Restored Frame One of the restoration tools McGeoch finds particular praise for is the ‘Fix Frame’ tool which he thinks performed near miracles on some of the sequences. “Several frames were so damaged that they needed to be completely rebuilt” he says, adding ”Particularly useful for this was the ‘Fix Frame’ tool. It was easy to use and produced flawless results time and again”. Designed specifically to address the problems McGeoch was experiencing, the effect uses information from adjacent frames to generate missing pixels, but unlike simple cloning this tool calculates pixel position using The Pixel Farm’s own motion estimation technology. All the user need do is identify an area to be repaired by using the provided tools to draw a boundary around it. Once this is done a single button click is usually enough to repair the entire frame. Any fine tuning that might be needed can easily be applied by the comprehensive range of paint effect options, covering options such as tint, blur, sharpen and smooth through to luminance equalization, doge and burn, and a selection of others. In addition to the time saving solutions PFClean brought to the whole project McGeoch points out that support from The Pixel Farm was also first rate. “A modification to the software was requested to deal with a specific problem we were having with the footage. This was made and provided to us within a day. Technical support has been excellent.” Having enabled the restoration of a football genius to his animated best The Lost Film Facility’s only complaint is that despite The Pixel Farm’s best efforts their ball control is still very much third division. www.lostfilmfacility.com Words: Martin Southwood