The feature film "Room 36" was shot on 35mm but the negative was damaged in the scanning process. This lead the producers to look to the Digital Intermediary route and as a result signed up Mac Million of London for the editing and repair work that was needed. Mac Million were set to edit the job on their Sony Xpri system but knew they needed additional tools for the repair work, so they turned to Imagineer Systems and mokey. "Imagineer had shown us the mokey software before and we immediately recognised that it had the tools we needed for this job," said Justin Legg, Operations Manager.
The first job was to correct grain problems in some shots due to the use of different film stocks. Using mokey's grainsurgery module Mac Million were able to easily remove the grain from the shots in question and then match it to the rest of the shots.
Next damaged shots were repaired. Some of the joins that had special heat welds had been dragged during the telecine transfer and this was fixed by first employing the mokey tracker to track the frames, then using the stabilize module to stabilize the images. One of the real benefits of the mokey stabilizer is the 'Autofill' option which fills the black borders caused by the stabilization with data from other frames. This avoids zooming the shot, which would cause a loss in resolution and grain problems, "I was amazed how easily we stabilized the shot and then the Autofill blew me away" said Legg.
The final job was scratch removal again using the tracker, this time tracking background elements and then the scratches themselves. Then using the remove module Mac Million were able to remove these scratches easily and finally add grain to the areas replaced so they match the rest of the shot.
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With this done they were able to complete the editing of the film and transfer it back to film for its summer release. According to Legg "Using mokey is probably the quickest and easiest way to do what we wanted to do."
"Room 36" – Production: Ivory Tower Entertainment – DOP: Dave Read – Director: Jim Groom