Let's start by understanding the defects themselves. Over 98% of the defects on film damage the emulsion or base and not the actual image itself. This means that to truly restore the image we need to be able to "see" past the damage to the emulsion or base and pick up the actual image beneath. There are several old methods that have had some success in repairing the image. Wet gate processes run fluid on the film during printing or during the telecine process to fill in the scratches. In general this works relatively well. There are some draw backs to this approach. First, although the scratches do generally disappear, the fluid on the entire film softens the overall image. In addition, the fluid does nothing for dust, dirt particles or other defects on the film. The Infrared detection method shines infrared light that will pass through color film but will be disturbed by scratches, dust and dirt. The system can then create a defect map with the locations of the defects so down stream tools can repair them automatically or manually. There are two problems with infrared detection and concealment. First, infrared only works on color film. Using it on Black/White film produces undesirable results. The silver grains in the black and white film almost totally blocks the infrared light. This causes significant distortion of the image. Secondly, infrared detection and concealment require a downstream process to fix the defects. Our noval dust busting technology does not rely on ifrared technology and it works on all film including negatives, master positives, intermediate negatives, or prints, and older reversal stocks. The technology finds all defects and in 95% of caes can "look through" the defect to find the image details at that location. This dust busting technology does require a longer scan time as the film is being scanned. Defects that cannot be fixed are logged in a defect map for further down stream dust busting if necessary. Here are some examples.

Typical Film Defects

• Here's a typical film defect. The surface scratch is only on the emulsion itself.
• During scanning the machine detects the defects and is able to look beyond the emulsion to find the true image details as seen below.

Restored Image During Scanning

• The scanner isn't taking information from surrounding areas or from a similar area on a previouse frame.
• The scanner increses the sensitivity at the site of the defect to recover the image under the emulsion.
• In this case, 100% of the defects were fixed.

Man Made Deep Defects

• In this example we have purposely made deep scrtaches to show an extreme example.
• It's hard to image being able to recover much of this during scanning.

Defect Map With Dust Busting Off

• Here is the defect map of the frame above with dust busting off to show the full extent of the damage.
• You can see that the extent of the damage is severe and not something you would typically find on film.

Restored Image During Scanning

• You can see that with dust busting turned on it is actually able to remove even the majority of deep man made scratches during scanning.
• In addition, it provides a defect map for further down stream dust busting.