Digital Intermediate: Framestore - Digital Lab
Retouch Operators: Adam Parker, Matthew Baker, Edwin Metternich, O'dean Thompson
Production: The Boat That Rocked - Feature Film

The latest film from UK writer/director Richard Curtis, The Boat That Rocked, tells of a pirate radio station in 1966 that broadcasts from a sea faring vessel off the English coast provoking angry reaction from stuffy establishment government officials who do their best to scupper the station. Inspired by actual historical events around the famous Radio Caroline story. The film's cast includes Philip Seymour Hoffman, Kenneth Branagh, Bill Nighy and Rhys Ifans and is an ensemble comedy which sails through very shallow waters and has subsequently failed to make waves with film critics despite a very respectable showing at the box office.

To make sure the movie was in ship-shape condition before it's maiden voyage, Framestore's Digital lab (Dlab) gave it a thorough dustbust using The Pixel Farm's powerful DI restoration package PFClean, as part of their pipeline. The fact that PFClean does integrate so usefully into the production workflow is key to the product's growing popularity and certainly appealed to Framestore who have a long tradition of innovation in digital film scanning, image processing and recording, gaining several Technical Academy Awards for developing related technologies. Head of Dlab Ben Baker comments, "Integration from IR pass on Northlight greatly helped, and saved us a mammoth amount of time on the dustbust. In fact the IR/ Baselight integration removed up to six other processes in getting frames to the dustbusting team, and getting them rendered out again. It's this part of the product particularly that we purchased PFClean for."

The film was shot on 35mm film and was digitally scanned on Northlight scanners at 2k. Grading was performed on Filmlight's Baselight and output back onto Kodak Negative. The film had to have a full, high quality clean up. Dlab retouch used PFClean for all 144000 frames. PFClean's seamless integration into existing pipelines, in this case Filmlight's Baselight and Northlight can save a great deal of time as it fully supports Infra-Red (IR) defect maps and allows footage to be graded while simultaneously being restored or cleaned. Retouch artist at Dlab Adam Parker explains further, "Overall our work flow was greatly sped up by the ability to automate the removal of dirt using PFClean combined with our IR matte on the command line before we began cleaning the film. At first we ran a temporal fix over every shot using our defect map through PFClean, but as we got to the parts of the movie where the boat starts taking on water we needed to change to spacial fixes. PFClean handled this with ease, allowing us to disable the temporal layer, and easily apply and run a new spacial fix layer, saving us a lot of time."

Intuitive and easy to understand, PFClean can automate the image clean up process and provides a comprehensive set of non-destructive tools to fix any type of anomaly as part of a fast, non-linear workflow, so that the user can enjoy an unlimited number of non-sequential undos while also being able to go back at any stage to make further edits without the need of further renders. In this way Dlab firstly ran an automated Clean dirt/dust effect, using the Infra-Red (IR) pass for the defect map, which will usually clean most of the dirt. Then, a second manual pass using the 'mark dirt' tool to remove the rest. "This feature also enables us to have a fast turn around on removing any dust spotted during the mastering/final QC stages after the dustbust process." says Adam, going on to explain how other tools were used. "Occasionally we would need to paint out more complex dust issues. For this we mainly used the Repair or the Clone brushes, and its worth mentioning that, in order to attain an invisible fix using the repair brush, we also took advantage of the de-grain/re-grain tools to create a suitable preset for use throughout this project." This was particularly useful for one sequence where a black hair caught in the gate of the camera had to be removed. To fix the problem Adam used PFClean's de-grain/re-grain menu to sample the grain in the shot and generate a preset which accurately matches it. Then the Repair brush was used to make a constant paint stroke over the hair, before applying the re-grain to that brush to have the fix match the rest of the shot. Should the hair move, another Repair brush stroke to the visible hair, and re-grain can be applied as needed.

Dlab also found PFClean very helpful correcting the problems of an over sensitive IR matte. Usually this means there are areas on the defect map which do not contain dust, but have picked out highlights in the actual image, and interpreted them as dust. PFClean allowed the team to track and mask off these areas before re-running the clean dirt/dust layer (again using the defect map) without it picking out these problem highlights.

In fact PFClean's range of capabilities go far beyond routine dust-busting offering fast and efficient solutions to the most intensive film restoration projects as Framestore's Dlab themselves have been finding out on recent restoration projects such as the Wallace and Gromit features from Aardman. Version 4.5 announced at this year's NAB has improved the package still further with the introduction of a visual Workflow Manager. A unique feature that provides a complete visual overview of an entire project and it's several processes and allows control over it from this vantage point.

With Framestore's reputation for technological innovation it's no surprise that they have invested in this uniquely capable bit of essential and time saving DI kit.

Words: Martin Southwood