Forge Automated Dust-Busting improved with IR Technology

The Foundry has announced a new development with its award-winning Forge dust-busting technology.
Forge, a cost-effective command line application, that automatically corrects day-to-day flecks of dirt, dust and hair that occur on digital film scans, is now able to take full advantage of the latest infrared scanning technology, enabling huge savings in time and money.
When used alongside any infrared equipped scanner, Forge uses the data in the IR pass to identify the regions of dirt in the scan that require repair. Forge then automatically produces clean plates without the risk of so-called 'false positives' (where parts of the filmed image are incorrectly identified as dirt or dust) with minimal impact on film scanning times. When used alongside an IR equipped scanner, Forge massively reduces the need for operator assisted dirt removal and reduces the cost of day-to-day scanning.
The Foundry has been working in close collaboration with UK digital film technology developer FilmLight, to seamlessly integrate Forge into its Northlight scanning technology. Now, FilmLight customers can opt to have Forge technology as a fully integrated dust-busting package within their Northlight scanning pipeline. Northlight’s control software enables fully scripted support for Forge, meaning that Forge will automatically detect and clean scanned sequences generated by IR pass of the Northlight scanner and then produce clean scans with no operator input.
Winner of the IBC 2005 New Product Award Forge was originally scripted into the scanning workflow to perform an automatic examination of scanned footage, identifying dirt on the image and using this information to perform a motion compensated repair. Despite the fact that this method is very effective and a vast improvement on operator-assisted dirt and dust removal it can produce false positives. Although there are numerous quick and easy solutions to correct false positives, with Forge, customers can now opt to combine dust-busting packages with an infrared enabled scanner for maximum benefit.
For further information please visit www.thefoundry.co.uk
(SP)