We recently restored William Raban’s “Thames Film,” which is cared for by the BFI.  The film is currently part of the Estuary exhibit, curated by the Museum of London.

The film was originally shot in 1984 on 16mm, often at night on stock that was wildly underexposed.  Further complicating things was Black & White library footage dating back to the early 20th century – It was certainly challenging material to work with.

We started the job by cleaning the negative, and scanning it at native 2k.

We then used tools like PixelFarm’s PFClean to remove dirt, scratches and sparkle.  Some of the footage was especially grainy, so we ran it through a de-noising process.

Finally, we colour graded in our DaVinci Resolve suite, before outputting a master file for delivery.

For archive purposes, we created two frame-accurate two DPX sequences – one with our work, and one ‘clean’, straight from the film scanner.  These are delivered to the filmmaker on accessible hard drives, as well as LTO Tape for long term storage.

Despite being swamped by sound, grading and VFX work, we’ve somehow found the time to give our website a much-need overhaul.

We’re updating the site to be more content-focused.  That means cutting new reels, and uploading more projects as we work on them.  There’s lots to do, but the overall structure is there now!

The Finishing Factory graded this music video in our DaVinci Resolve 4k suite, making this lovely video (shot on RED EPIC) really sing. Good stuff!

We invited the directing duo of the Handheld Cinema Club and director of photography Brian Strange to our London colour grading suite, where we put the finishing touches on this great little film (the song’s not too bad either!).

The video was edited in Final Cut Pro, before being prepped and conformed for grading in DaVinci Resolve. We then sent it back to Final Cut Pro for online and mastering.

Enjoy.