Dye Fade Tool in Diamant Restoration Suite

[Todd Ruel]

Hey, all.

I noticed recently that HS-Art, which makes the Diamant Film Restoration Suite, is now offering a Dye Fade Tool in said suite. 

This tool seems to have been developed by a company called Scan2Screen which includes a bunch of film restoration experts including Dr. Barbara Fluekiger.  Since some of you experienced pros have issues with some of her research in the past, do you have any opinions about the effectiveness of a tool like this?

We use Diamant pretty much exclusively.  They have a yearly subscription model, but it’s a pretty steep price for us, so we don’t upgrade every year.  (We find the changes from one year to the next just aren’t worth it.). But we do a LOT of dye fade correction on vintage TV commercials.

So do you think a tool like this would be worth it?

[Robert Houllahan]

What is the yearly cost for Diamant? 

[Tyler Purcell]

2 hours ago, Robert Houllahan said:

What is the yearly cost for Diamant? 

Last time I checked, it was $1499/month 

[Perry Paolantonio]

13 hours ago, Robert Houllahan said:

What is the yearly cost for Diamant? 

They sell it outright (permanent license) and it's about $20k. The annual fee Todd is talking about is probably the support contract (which presumably comes with a software update, if available), which I think is in the $3k range. This is a little different than an annual "subscription." 

We looked into getting it in 2016 and checked in on the pricing recently because I'm not very happy with the direction Filmworkz (Phoenix) is heading with their subscription-only pricing.

In a subscription model you lose the software when you stop paying. In a permanent license model with a support contract you buy it outright but get updates and support for your annual fee.

Diamant has a physical USB dongle, but they do have a license server, so they must offer a monthly version as well (which a lot of these applications do, in case you only occasionally use them). 

Edited June 10 by Perry Paolantonio

[Robert Houllahan]

OK so similar to MTI DRS Nova pricing only a bit more for the permanent license.

Screw subscriptions especially for software like this I don't really want to even look at Phoenix.

I just used the 30 day trial of MTI DRS to do a restoration on a 1984 16mm film about Phillipe Petit with a Philip Glass soundtrack and the A&B rolls had extensive issues with the cement bleeding onto other areas of the film as the rolls were wrapped / taken up when the negative conformer cut it.

I really liked using DRS it worked very well and was very easy to learn and seems to have a pretty great deep feature set.

[Tyler Purcell]

2 minutes ago, Robert Houllahan said:

I really liked using DRS it worked very well and was very easy to learn and seems to have a pretty great deep feature set.

Yea it works great, it's a hog resource wise, but it's a very good tool, arguably the best. 

I'm starting a huge project shortly that the client doesn't have a lot of money for, so I'm gonna license PFClean and use their new AI tools and see how it goes. I hope it works well, the tests we've done with them thus far, have been stellar. The DRS AI frame generation tool is incredible as well, but they charge more for it. 

[Robert Houllahan]

6 minutes ago, Tyler Purcell said:

Yea it works great, it's a hog resource wise, but it's a very good tool, arguably the best. 

I'm starting a huge project shortly that the client doesn't have a lot of money for, so I'm gonna license PFClean and use their new AI tools and see how it goes. I hope it works well, the tests we've done with them thus far, have been stellar. The DRS AI frame generation tool is incredible as well, but they charge more for it. 

As far as I understand it the AI frame gen is included in the permanent license price.

I ran it on a Xeon E5-2699 CPU  X99 system with a new RTX 3080Ti GPU and it did not lag or feel clunky despite the X99-Xeon being a bit older CPU and chipset.

[Perry Paolantonio]

MTI's software is great for manual work. They're way behind the curve on the automated side of things though. Phoenix Dry Clean is really good at this part, but the licensing sucks. Manual cleanup on MTI is miles ahead of anyone else and once you get into a rhythm, you can work really move fast. But because the app only works with DPX files, it's a bit of a clunker and requires a ton of disk space. Most of the other applications work with ProRes or DPX (or EXR, or other formats too), and since the vast majority of the work we do comes in as ProRes, with only a few exceptions, that's really important and has kept us from going back to MTI. If this has changed I'm all ears! I learned on MTI Correct 20+ years ago.

The fact is, there is no single tool that does everything well. If I had to pick two to use on the regular it'd be MTI and Phoenix, probably. With our permanent (older) Phoenix Touch license, we can do almost everything we'd need to do, but the full version of Phoenix gets you access to the grading tools, which are useful for things like scratch concealment. 

PFClean is utter garbage and the company behind it is even worse. They won't admit when they have problems and they won't stand behind their software. We lost tens of thousands of dollars in completed work because of the crash fest that was PFClean. absolute nightmare. The only serious contenders here are MTI, Phoenix, and Diamant. 

[Tyler Purcell]

8 hours ago, Robert Houllahan said:

As far as I understand it the AI frame gen is included in the permanent license price.

OOOO Reaaaalllly. That's new then! We did a film restoration open house late last year and they said it wasn't included, but that's great to know. 

8 hours ago, Robert Houllahan said:

I ran it on a Xeon E5-2699 CPU  X99 system with a new RTX 3080Ti GPU and it did not lag or feel clunky despite the X99-Xeon being a bit older CPU and chipset.

Yea I haven't tried it on our new system, Phoenix is really nice tho! So happy to have a new system finally. 
Ryzen 9950X with 5080. Still kinda wish we had more video memory, but we just don't do enough restoration to be worth it. ||

7 hours ago, Perry Paolantonio said:

The fact is, there is no single tool that does everything well. If I had to pick two to use on the regular it'd be MTI and Phoenix, probably. With our permanent (older) Phoenix Touch license, we can do almost everything we'd need to do, but the full version of Phoenix gets you access to the grading tools, which are useful for things like scratch concealment. 

Yea Phoenix Dry Clean is very good. The only thing it's not great at is generating new data to cover scratches. DRS does tho, so that helps, but so does PFClean... 

7 hours ago, Perry Paolantonio said:

PFClean is utter garbage and the company behind it is even worse. They won't admit when they have problems and they won't stand behind their software. We lost tens of thousands of dollars in completed work because of the crash fest that was PFClean. absolute nightmare. The only serious contenders here are MTI, Phoenix, and Diamant. 

Yea, everyone has warned me. I wasn't going to invest, just get a license for a month and test. We're also a 90% Mac shop, so it's nice to have something that is native to our systems and just flat out works on our color grading bay which is Mac of course. I'm still frustrated Digital Vision hasn't made their DVO plugins for film cleanup available to OFX plugins on Mac. They clearly use CUDA, which sucks. This is why we built a new PC. 

[Dirk DeJonghe]

We use PFClean since about 20 years or more, it has been very stable, we get good support when we need it for special cases. We run on Linux 95% and Mac 5%. 

[Todd Ruel]

On 6/10/2025 at 10:38 AM, Perry Paolantonio said:

Diamant has a physical USB dongle, but they do have a license server, so they must offer a monthly version as well (which a lot of these applications do, in case you only occasionally use them).

I’m not aware that HS-Art offers a monthly version.  Walter, their sales guy, would have already bugged the heck out of me by now if that were true.  Their dongle is simply a license check, but you better not lose that dongle or else you’ve lost your entire license.

Yes, you pay a yearly license for access to all their current software and updates.  I paid $3,800 a few years ago to update two versions of Dustbuster+ (you might call it Diamant Lite) and a full version of Diamant.  After that license expired, I got to keep all the software I’ve paid for but no more updates until I renew the license.

I’ve found that with Diamant, the changes from one year to the next are not that dramatic.  More evolution than revolution.  However, this Dye Fade Correction Tool sounds exciting.  Knowing Diamant, it’s the beginning of “exciting” and not truly exciting yet.  They’ve asked me to send them a sample clip, so I’ll try that first and report back.

[Perry Paolantonio]

4 hours ago, Dirk DeJonghe said:

We use PFClean since about 20 years or more, it has been very stable, we get good support when we need it for special cases. We run on Linux 95% and Mac 5%. 

I can only speak to our experience, which was absolutely abysmal. It managed to crash so consistently in such a way as to obliterate tens of hours of saved work. When it would crap out, it would take the project database files with it, so there was no way to recover work you had done (and saved). Truly awful. 

It was also massively resource-intensive, in that almost any fix had many, many tiny files associated with it. Projects that consisted of 6 Quicktime files might balloon to several hundred thousand tiny little files, which made backups painfully slow. It also left a lot of that behind in the folder, so when it crashed, new fix files were created alongside those, resulting in way more junk. Doing an LTO backup of a PFClean project was an all day affair, even though it wasn't that much data - just a truckload of tiny files that wreaked havoc on the filesystem. 

We used it on Windows, which at the time was the preferred system. And we built our machine to their spec, which they then changed on us and told us they wouldn't support (even though the system we built was the one they recommended for the version we were running). It was really something. I'll never buy anything from them because of the way they treated us and will yell from the rooftops any time I hear of anyone else thinking of it!

I will say the "fix frame" (I think it was called) tool worked some kind of crazy miracles on footage we had that had greasy fingerprint marks only in the blue channel. I don't know what it did, but it wiped that out instantly, and those fingerprints were on either side of every splice in a feature. Other than that - junk, as far as I'm concerned.