by Robin Rowe 2/22/04
CinePaint is digital painting and frame-by-frame retouching software used in feature film post-production. Traditionally it is used to remove dust and other blemishes from motion pictures. Motion picture image sequences (frames) are manipulated in the form of sequentially numbered image files, typically stored in Cineon or TIFF format (e.g., 0000001.tiff, 0000002.tiff, etc.).
It was Frank Wylie of the Library of Congress who suggested that CinePaint's existing capabilities and open source design make it a good platform for film restoration. Most film restoration today is done using traditional wet-gate chemical methods for lack of a cost-effective digital tool. That CinePaint is a free open source tool enables building upon the work of others.
Unrestored film can have many defects
- Registration (image stabilization of jumpy picture)
- Geometric distortion (removing film curl)
- Scratches (inpainting)
- Dirt (dust-busting)
- Contrast (restoring faded frames)
- Color (color grading, removing color shifts to magenta)
- Timing (retiming fps due to speed variations of handcranking)
To use CinePaint for dust-busting, a sequence of frames is loaded into the flipbook and an operator uses the clone brush to copy unblemished areas from an adjacent frame. This technique can be used on scratches, too. We're reseaching adding a more automated scratch removal process called inpainting. Our preferred approach to inpainting is to integrate university-developed code.
Registration and distortion correction are significant features we need. We are preparing to implement those from scatch because we have not found suitable code to integrate. Our approach is to use horizontal and vertical edge detection and plot the intersection of these edges as a set of points written to a metadata file (as text). A post-processing algorithm will compute the geometry to correct shifts in these plot points. Then, a batch process will apply the corrections frame-by-frame, outputting a new film sequence of restored frames. With this approach, multiple archives holding the same unrestored digital footage could share restorations by emailing the lightweight metadata rather than ship the huge batch-rendered restoration frames.
Approaches to handle contrast, color, and retiming are still under evaluation.
list of companies who use CinePaint -- Tue, 01 Jun 2004 13:39:23 -0700 reply
Is it possible to receive a list of the companies that use CinePaint in the Los Angeles area? I'm in the process of looking for a job in the field of "Dirt Busting" but I'm having a hard time finding a web site that supplies the names of companies that do it. I would be very helpful to me.
Please contact me at tootdadoo@earthlink.net my name is Vernette Griffee