v2024.5 Boris FX Continuum Unit: Image Restoration

The must-have “fix it in post” toolset

Not all heroes wear capes. Quickly fix flicker, remove damaged pixels, smooth skin & remove blemishes, sharpen blurry footage, reframe vertical footage, and more.

Imperfect footage happens. Instantly fix flickering footage, reduce noise, and remove damaged pixels. Apply digital makeup and more.

Highlights include:

• 19 effects
• 100s of drag & drop presets
• Fix flickering footage
• Remove damaged pixels
• Beauty Studio digital makeup
• Sharpen footage & reduce noise
• Mocha tracking & masking
• Beat Reactor audio-driven animation
• FX Editor with custom interface
• More!

The Continuum Image Restoration Unit offers multi-host support with a single license.

Features

• On-screen control widgets
• Professionally designed factory installed presets
• Integrated FX Browser
• Integrated PixelChooser matte and masking system
• Support for Adobe host native mask shapes
• Integrated Mocha masking and planar tracking system
• Integrated Beat Reactor for audio generated VFX
• Hardware acceleration (OpenGL/OpenCL)
• Multi-processor (SMP) and multi-core (CMP) support

Effects

Beauty Studio

Quite often, in these days of cameras equipped with ultra sharp lenses and highly sensitive light sensors, we’re seeing more detail than ever before in images on screen. Akin to digital make-up, the BCC Beauty Studio filter was designed to automate the process of eliminating wrinkles, pores and other undesirable blemishes from the skin-tones in a close up shot of a person’s face.

There are two stages to the filter:

• Building an isolation matte for the skin-tone
• Smoothing the skin-tone.

Additionally, you can use the integrated color correction tools to modify the hue, saturation and brightness of the image. The color correction can be applied to the entire image or confined to the masked skin-tone.

The built in PixelChooser with integrated mocha planar tracking allows for greater control over which areas of the image the filter should affect. Unlike_ _most BCC filters, BCC Beauty Studio has the PixelChooser enabled by default with a color key enabled to begin isolating skin tones.  It is critical for optimum results in Beauty Studio to review and if necessary fine tune the skin isolation matte/mask generated by the PixelChooser.

Broadcast Safe Effects

Continuum’s Broadcast Safe is the easiest way to guarantee projects pass broadcast safe standards in any market. Pick your desired preset, render, and you’re done! Continuum’s soft knee approach to maintaining safe color and luma levels means you’ll never suffer from dreaded crushed highlights again.

DV Fixer

The BCC DV Fixer filter is designed to remove diagonal stair-caseing (also known as aliasing or jaggies) that are apparent in images or clips that have been subject to DV compression, while maintaining the overall sharpness of the original image.

The built in PixelChooser allows for greater control over which areas of the image the filter should affect.

Dropout Fixer

The BCC Dropout Fixer filter was designed to fix field glitches / artifacts in a source clip which are present as a the result of digitizing tape based media with faulty equipment.

Sometimes digitized media will have fields that contain artifacts due to brief signal loss – the BCC Dropout Fixer filter provides a way to isolate the exact frame with the field artifact and replace the damaged portion of the field with data from a near field.

It is important to note that:

• This filter only works on on interlaced media and output rendering must be fielded.
• Each instance of the filter affects only one field, but can affect that field on multiple frames.
• If the same area of the same field has dropouts on several consecutive frames, they can be fixed with one instance by setting a higher value in the Dropout Length parameter.

Dust and Scratches

The BCC Dust and Scratches filter removes unwanted dust and scratches from an image to help restore old and damaged footage.

The built in PixelChooser with integrated mocha planar tracking allows for greater control over which areas of the image the filter should affect.

Flicker Fixer

The BCC Flicker Fixer filter  is designed to eliminate flicker from source footage. It provides 3 different methods for removing flicker.

• Frame Analysis is intended for use with clips with flicker that is uniform throughout the frame – e.g. flicker that is caused by unintended shutter speed or aperture variations from frame to frame.
• Two Temporal Smoothing methods  are intended for use with clips in which the flicker varies from pixel to pixel within the frame – e.g. a scene that is lit partly by natural light and partly by a flickering artificial light.

The Frame Analysis method always analyzes the whole frame, and is not suitable for clips where the flicker is limited to a small part of each frame. If most of the frame is flickering and a small part is not, the Frame Analysis method will generally remove most (but not all) of the flicker, but is likely to add flicker to the non‐flickering part of the clip. You can use the Mask and key controls to isolate the non‐flickering part of the clip and prevent this flicker from being added.

The Temporal Smoothing method processes each pixel independently. If part of the image is flickering and part is not, you can usually get good results by processing the whole clip. The filter will produce some softening (since it works by smoothing) in the non-­‐flickering part of the image, and you cause the Matte controls to isolate this region and prevent any image softening.

Lens Correction

The BCC Lens Correction filter is designed to reduce or remove image distortion in source clips that were shot using a wide angle or fish-eye lens. It can also be used to make simple perspective corrections.

BCC Lens Correction includes a number of presets specifically designed for go-pro cameras.

Magic Sharp

The BCC Magic Sharp filter uses algorithms to enhance image detail while minimizing artifacts associated with traditional sharpening tools.

The core sharpening algorithm performs up to four passes labelled:

• Fine
• Small
• Medium
• Course.

Each pass targets physical details that have wider and wider pixel dimensions with each stage focusing on details of roughly twice the pixel dimensions as the previous stage.

Additional controls allow fine tuning the amount of sharpening applied to individual color channels and to independent luma ranges along with the ability to suppress noise or grit introduced during the sharpening process.

The built in PixelChooser with integrated mocha planar tracking allows for greater control over which areas of the image the filter should affect.

Motion Key

The BCC Motion Key filter allows you to isolate and remove a moving foreground object based on motion estimation. For example, you have a static shot of some buildings and a car passes by on the street in front of the buildings. You could use this filter to remove the car and replace it with the buildings.

The built in Motion Tracker allows for greater control over which areas of the image the filter should affect.

Noise Reduction

The BCC Noise Reduction filter smooths out noise by comparing each pixel with the pixels in it’s immediate temporal and spatial neighborhood. For each pixel, it blends in pixels that are close (in color) to the pixel, while ignoring pixels that are distant in color. This allows us to smooth out the noise without losing detail.

This filter is designed to remove noise from camera images, and will not work properly unless the input is fully opaque.

The built in PixelChooser with integrated mocha planar tracking allows for greater control over which areas of the image the filter should affect.

Optical Stabilizer

The BCC Optical Stabilizer filter enables you to quickly and easily stabilize shaky video footage, such as clips that were shot with a hand-held camera. The Optical Stabilizer uses optical flow technology to analyze every frame in the source clip to determine the movement of the camera and then adjusts the position, rotation and scale of the clip to compensate for the unwanted camera movement. Depending upon filter parameter settings the motion in the clip will either be smoothed or completely locked down. Unlike many image stabilization tools, the BCC Optical Stabilizer does not require you to set and keyframe user-defined tracking points, which is very useful for images where point tracking data is unreliable.

Because the very nature of post camera image stabilization causes the image to be cropped, this filter includes post image stabilization options to fill the blank areas around the of the frame, such as:

• Repeating pixels along the cropped edges,
• Mirroring the image along those edges,
• Filling them with solid color
• Leaving them transparent.

An autoscale function is also included in the filter. The Auto Scale function, which is enabled by default, automatically transform scales the image so that it fills the frame across time. Also included in the filter are seven user-selectable transform scale algorithms, which ensure optimal post-transform image sharpness.

Note that Optical Stabilizer is designed to be applied to individual clips without cuts.  If you have a “compound” clip that contains multiple cuts you should first split the content into separate segments for each cut and apply Optical Stabilizer separately to the individual segments.  Similarly Optical Stabilizer is not designed to be applied to Adjustment Layers or Precomps that span multiple separate clips, but instead should be applied separately to each individual clip.

Pixel Fixer

The primary purpose of the BCC Pixel Fixer filter is to fix bad pixels caused by bad pixels on the sensor in digital video and still cameras. The filter may also be used to fix bad spots on digital still images caused by dust on the sensor.

Reframer

The BCC Reframer filter was designed to ease the work of integrating video that was shot in portrait format into a landscape video frame. Typical application of this filter might be inserting footage that was sourced on an iPhone into an HD format sequence.

Due to the special nature of this filter the parameter list and suggested workflow can vary considerably from one host to another.

Remover

The BCC Remover filter was designed to provide a semi-automatic way of removing small undesired elements from an image or video clip by cloning pixels from one user defined section of the image to another section of the image.

There are three stages involved in setting up this filter: Setting the destination (pixels to be removed / replaced), setting the source (pixels to fill the area to be removed), and selecting a method of removal. There are currently 4 distinct modes of object removal:

• Auto-Fill Sharp (fills the distinction shape with surrounding pixels)
• Auto-Fill Smooth (fills the distinction shape with surrounding pixels, then smooths the result)
• Clone Spot (clone stamp from source to destination, similar to paint cloning)
• Clone Shape (fills the destination region with pixels from the source region)

Each of these methods will yield a different result and, given the subjective nature of object removal from an image frame, a trial and error approach of going through the different modes is recommended. As you become more familiar with the filter and how it will operate on different types of images, the mode selection will become more predictable.

The built in PixelChooser with integrated mocha planar tracking allows for greater control over the shape and motion tracking of the removal area.

Smooth Tone

The BCC Smooth Tone filter is designed to control the smoothness of an input image or clip while retaining as much of the original image detail as possible. This process is achieved via the use of the image processing algorithms that are at the heart of the filter.

The degree of smoothing is controlled by adjustments to the radius parameter with higher values generating a smoother result and the degree of image sharpness if controlled by making adjustments to the range parameter, with higher values preserving less image detail.

The built in PixelChooser allows for greater control over which areas of the image the filter should affect.

Uprez

The BCC Uprez filter is used to increase the resolution of source clips (for example SD to HD or SD/HD to 4K) while ensuring maximum possible image quality. Uprez uses advanced techniques to maintain and fine tune image details, generating much higher quality final images than can be obtained with standard host upscaling.

Due to the special nature of this filter the parameter list and suggested workflow can vary considerably from one host to another.

Wire Remover

The BCC Wire Remover filter removes wires and unwanted objects from still or moving images by either cloning or blending pixels together from surrounding areas. This filter has several uses. When working with blue or green screen shots, use this filter to remove wires or eliminate unwanted rigs or objects prior to keying. You can also use this filter to blend replacement pixels over video dropouts or film scratches.

The Wire Remover filter also includes two motion tracker parameter groups. This allows you to track the ends of the wire if the ends move.