Learning Phoenix with Catalina
Everyone Starts Somewhere follows Catalina in the Phoenix Restoration & Color from the ground up. With a background in film preservation and digitisation, she’s documenting the real-world challenges, discoveries and milestones of becoming a digital restoration artist. Whether you’re just starting out or refining your skills, we hope her experiences inspire you to begin (or continue) your own journey.
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Catalina’s articles will hopefully give you a head-start – you can also Ask Juno for guidance on using Phoenix – Juno’s always there for 24/7 global support, any language, any time!
And you can follow Catalina in Pocket Films, alongside a host of global Providers who make films happen.
Getting to Know Your Footage
Hi there! Have you been practising or trying some DVO Tools?
This is a bit of a transition post. We’re done with the Getting Started series, and from here on I’ll be sharing more hands-on work: things I’m practising, decisions I’m making, problems I run into.
To start, I want to talk about something more general: how I approach a new project before touching any tool. To me, the first thing is to get to know the material. So before anything else, I play it through a couple of times to see it as a whole and get a general sense of its defects and its strengths. I do this before scene cut detection, so I can form a general impression first:
- Is it dirty?
- Is it unsteady? Is the unsteadiness consistent throughout, or does it change? Does it come from digitisation or from a previous generation? Is the camera movement itself unsteady?
- Is it damaged? What kind of damage does it have?
- What’s the thing that affects it the most?
Because once you start working shot by shot, you begin noticing other issues — for example, dirty splices — but the footage as a whole might not be that dirty; it could just be concentrated in the splices. This general view also gives you an idea of which tools you’ll use and what workflow to follow.
I’ve started a few projects now, and I always begin by playing the footage in the timeline. Then I run scene cut detection and watch it again, checking the work done and correcting some cuts (adding or removing them). During this second pass, I start adding bookmarks over things that catch my attention, using colour to keep things organised: for example, red for heavy dirt or big blotches, yellow for specific stabilisation issues, light blue for doubts I want to come back to.
Once I’ve done this first pass and run scene cut detection, I move on to stabilisation — which is what I’ll be diving into in the next post.
That’s it for this step. See you in the next one,
C.
