Digital Wet Gate

Standards  |  Usage

The Digital Wet Gate emulates the physical ‘Wet Gates’ as found on film scanning equipment and telecine machines. Our software interpretation of the Wet Gate provides a set tools for quickly removing common physical film artefacts such as dirt, dust and scratches in much the same way as the physical counterpart would, but with many advantages such as the ability to manage or even remove film texture (Grain), and without the need to use harmful chemicals.

Whilst additional tools are available elsewhere in the Workbench for finer control of the restoration process, the Digital Wet Gate node is able to take advantage of significant GPU acceleration to provide quick pre-processing, and in many cases can generate a final finished restoration without the need for further time consuming work.

Cleaned image data generated by the Digital Wet Gate node can be cached to disk in the Workflow Manager if required. This can greatly accelerate any additional restoration work needed in the Workbench node, or for further operations such as Standards conversion. Note that caching will only be available if a disk cache location have been specified for the format standard of the cleaned clips.

For further details describing worklists and presets, see the Workflow Manager documentation.

Standards

One set of parameters are used to to clean all clips in the node. For that reason, it is recommended that all clips in the node are of the same incoming standard. To ensure this, a standard format can be selected in the Workflow Manager before using the the node.

If no standard format has been set in the Workflow Manager, it can be set in the Standard Selection panel at the bottom left of the Digital Wet Gate interface.

Standards can be created and assigned to your clips in the Media Admin panel.

Usage

The Digital Wet Gate controls are grouped into four sections. The three parameters controlling Texture, Defects and Holdout Masks can be enabled or disabled by clicking the Enabled or Disabled button to the right of the section title.

When processing clips that contain a defect map in the alpha channel, the recommended workflow is as follows:

1. Adjust the Defect Map parameters to ensure bad pixels are correctly identified, then adjust the texture controls in order to produce a cleaned image;

2. If necessary, draw Holdout Masks in any frames where the defect map has incorrectly identified bad pixels to prevent dirt cleaning in these areas;

3. Adjust the Texture Control parameters to produce a cleaned image;

4. Use additional tools in the Workbench to correct further artefacts such as flickering, or manually clean dirt pixels that have been missed by the defect map.

If a defect map is not available, and dirt/dust and scratches need to be detected automatically:

1. Adjust the Dirt/Dust Detect % parameter to detect as much dirt as necessary;

2. Adjust the Dirt/Dust Reject % parameter to remove as many incorrectly classified defects as necessary;

3. Adjust the Scratches parameters to remove as many scratches as possible from the image;

4. If necessary, draw Holdout Masks in any frames where the dirt or scratches have been incorrectly identified to prevent dirt cleaning in these areas;

5. Adjust the Texture Control parameters to produce a cleaned image;

6. Use additional tools in the Workbench to correct further artefacts such as flickering, or manually clean dirt pixels that have been missed by the automated detection algorithms.