Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1536513
WORKFLOW www.postmagazine.com 26 POST MAY/JUNE 2025 f you've been in video production long enough, something will go wrong. Maybe catastrophically wrong. In the 30-plus years I've been shooting and editing, I have seen a number of goof- ups by crews or equipment failures. Most of the time, I was able to remedy the issue with software in post. It was usually a bad white balance or noisy audio that were not big problems. That all changed for me last October. One of my clients is a think tank called the American Freedom Alliance. I do their production and post in the Los Angeles area, where they are based. Recently, they took their "WW III: The Early Years" conference on tour throughout the US. The conference included speakers from the military, in- telligence world, authors, former White House staff, etc. When the conference was outside of LA, my client would usually get a referral to an AV compa- ny in the city they were going to, and I would go over what I want from them. We had great luck with this method in four out of five cities. Then, Allentown, PA, happened. We normally don't live stream the conference, but we did this time, and I was given a link to look at the recorded stream. Upon looking at it — all 7.5 hours of it — it looked horrendous. I would liken it to a fourth generation VHS recording, on poor tape stock, with lots of drop- outs. It was shot on a PTZ camera, went through a switcher, went to stream, and was recorded as high-quality ProRes files on a Blackmagic Design HyperDeck. I had the AV crew ship me the HyperDeck files. They were slightly better — more third generation VHS recording on poor tape stock, with lots of dropouts. I delivered the news to my client. She was not happy, to say the least. At first, we thought it was a total loss. I started looking for a way to solve the problem. Ironically, if the bad video was on analog tape, I probably could have done something with it using a time- base corrector (TBC) with a dropout compensator. This was by far beyond the worst video I have seen. I opened Adobe Premiere Pro and started looking through my effects. I have been using Boris FX products since 1998 or so, and I started experimenting with some of the old BCC versions I had, but I had no luck. If you have never used BCC, there are nine "BCC units" that have effects for different uses. If you don't want Boris Continuum Complete, you can just buy or license what you need. If your main focus is color correc- tion, for example, then you may have no use for the transitions. Within BCC there are hundreds of filters and probably thousands of combinations of effects that can be used together. Since I was nearly overwhelmed with the possibili- ties, I emailed the folks at Boris FX to see if they had any suggestions. Twenty minutes later I was emailed these instructions: (1) apply BCC+ Denoise ML to the shot; (2) set the Model to Camera Noise 2.1; (3) duplicate the fil- ter. I tested it and it was much improved. A few hours later, they emailed me another solution: (1) apply BCC Median to the shot and the Median Length and Width parameters to a value of 3. This will remove the horizontal sensor noise that we're seeing; (2) apply BCC+ Denoise ML on top of that and select the Compression+Noise 2.1 model. I tried this on my main editing sys- tem, an Intel Core i9, 12-core 2.9 GHz CPU, 128GB RAM, an Nvidia RTX-6000 GPU, and a LaCie 12-Big Thunderbolt-3 RAID, and while I saw immediate results while the timeline was paused, hitting play bogged the system down. Rendering the file out would have taken many hours. Instead, I decided to pull out the "big gun" — an HP Z6 worksta- tion equipped with a 24-core Xeon CPU, 128GB RAM, and three Nvidia A6000 GPUs. While this also didn't allow real- time preview playback of the timeline, it did render the final results much quicker. It was able to render the fixed video at around six minutes per one minute of video. That may seem like a long time, but when you are taking an entire proj- ect that was thought to be a total loss, and salvaging it for a client, it is well worth the time. The client was amazed, and while the video was not necessarily the highest broadcast quality, it was certainly good enough to put on their YouTube channel. Boris Continuum Complete is a great tool to have in your toolkit. While I don't do much work with "visual" special effects, I do get a lot of footage from clients that they need fixed. These two filters will be essential to fixing problems in the future. EMERGENCY RESPONDER: BORIS CONTINUUM COMPLETE TO THE RESCUE BY MARC FRANKLIN A CASE STUDY IN SALVAGING BAD VIDEO I The initial recording had lots of dropouts. BCC was able to correct many of the issues.