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, 2025 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. 

[Daniel D. Teoli Jr.]

On 6/10/2025 at 12:25 AM, Tyler Purcell said:

Last time I checked, it was $1499/month 

Sweet Jesus!

[Daniel D. Teoli Jr.]

Is this what you are interested in?

Scan2Screen’s Unfading Tool is available as plugin inside the DIAMANT Software and also works on conventional scanned images.

Do you really need the $$ software to do this?

The amount of color grading they show should be able to be able to be done with your regular software. Wouldn't a Lasergraphics do better than what is shown with their in-computer fade adjustment ability?

As an archive, I'm glad I don't have to fool with general defects. My goal is to give people a sharp image. If they want to do something else with it, that is up to them. Much of the cine' film I deal with, especially old stag films, are too far gone. They have been duped to death. Only AI could fix it by completely redoing it. Sure, once in while I will post process things. But most scans are raw, at least with stills. 

Look at this thing...

Generates lost frames!

Who knows what AI will be able to do!

The question is...how much would Perry or Robert charge to generate a lost frame of two? $100...$500 per frame?

<><><><>

Daniel D. Teoli Jr. Archival Collection
Daniel D. Teoli Jr. Small Gauge Film Archive
Daniel D. Teoli Jr. Advertising Archive
Daniel D. Teoli Jr. VHS Video Archive
Daniel D. Teoli Jr. Popular Culture Archive
Daniel D. Teoli Jr. Audio Archive
Daniel D. Teoli Jr. Social Documentary Photography

 

 

 

 

[Perry Paolantonio]

14 hours ago, Daniel D. Teoli Jr. said:

The question is...how much would Perry or Robert charge to generate a lost frame of two? $100...$500 per frame?

I would appreciate it if you would refrain from speculating on our pricing in a public forum. People read stuff like that and think you're posting our prices. Trust me, it happens. You're way off base here with your guess. 

When we do restoration, we charge per hour (labor), not per frame. If we were using a tool like this it wouldn't cost you much of anything if it was part of a larger restoration project, we'd just fix it when we got to it. But we don't use that tool and I haven't seen it in action so I don't know how good a job it does. I'm very hesitant to use tools like this, because our clients are mainly archives and libraries, and archives and libraries generally don't want stuff that's invented by an AI in their film restorations. 

 

14 hours ago, Daniel D. Teoli Jr. said:

The amount of color grading they show should be able to be able to be done with your regular software. Wouldn't a Lasergraphics do better than what is shown with their in-computer fade adjustment ability?

The scan is the wrong place in the workflow to do this kind of thing. We occasionally use the "find grade" tool in the scanner but only for a secondary file, not for a master scan. That is, an access copy that's being generated to a low res MP4 or something like that, alongside a high resolution flat scan.

And even on a faded reel, it's never a one-grade setting for the whole reel. We scanned a faded 16mm reel last week that was almost entirely pink. But there was this one scene (not spliced in, it was part of the same contiguous strip of film), that was basically unfaded. Super weird, but it happens. Setting a single grade for the reel would make that shot look bad. You do this kind of thing post-scan, in grading software afterwards, for a reason. Otherwise, you're baking more problems into the scan that you have to deal with later, and depending on the grade applied in scan, you may not be able to fully recover the image later. That's why flat scans are a thing.

 

On 6/11/2025 at 2:07 AM, Tyler Purcell said:

Yea Phoenix Dry Clean is very good. The only thing it's not great at is generating new data to cover scratches.

DryClean isn't a scratch removal tool so I'm not sure why you'd bring that up. It's a dustbusting tool. They're different kinds of defects with different attributes, and require different algorithms to detect and conceal.

Phoenix has scratch concealment tools as well, which do work pretty well, but are not perfect. In our experience nobody makes a scratch removal tool that works in all cases, because scratches are wildly different depending on a variety of factors (how much lateral movement it contains, if it's on the base or emulsion, if it's wide or narrow, if it's sharp or fuzzy, etc). Hiding scratches effectively usually involves a laborious combination of matte tracking, grading, scratch concealment and some manual dustbusting to fix the artifacts that are left behind from all that manipulation of the image. I've yet to see an automated tool that works in most, nevemind all, situations without leaving some other undesirable artifact behind, and I've been doing digital film restoration for 20+ years.

Edited July 11, 2025 by Perry Paolantonio

[Tyler Purcell]

5 hours ago, Perry Paolantonio said:

DryClean isn't a scratch removal tool so I'm not sure why you'd bring that up. It's a dustbusting tool. They're different kinds of defects with different attributes, and require different algorithms to detect and conceal.

Because DryClean is one of the only fully automated tools in the system. 

PFClean can 100% automated remove scratches, no need to circle them, no need to go frame by frame, it's literally a check box. 

5 hours ago, Perry Paolantonio said:

Phoenix has scratch concealment tools as well, which do work pretty well, but are not perfect. In our experience nobody makes a scratch removal tool that works in all cases, because scratches are wildly different depending on a variety of factors (how much lateral movement it contains, if it's on the base or emulsion, if it's wide or narrow, if it's sharp or fuzzy, etc). Hiding scratches effectively usually involves a laborious combination of matte tracking, grading, scratch concealment and some manual dustbusting to fix the artifacts that are left behind from all that manipulation of the image. I've yet to see an automated tool that works in most, nevemind all, situations without leaving some other undesirable artifact behind, and I've been doing digital film restoration for 20+ years.

Phoenix's scratch removal tool is shit, it basically a clone tool, it does not create new material. Also, as you pointed out, it requires a substantial amount of tracking and manual work. 

PFClean does not, it's completely automated. It automatically detects scratches because they don't match the background for the most part. With one button, you can activate scratch removal and it will create all new material to fill the gaps. Where in our testing it worked flawlessly, I can see how it MAY get confused and potentially create the wrong information. Our wet gate conceals around 70% of scratches anyway, so in testing we've found PFClean to have no issues fixing the remainder. I will probably get another months license and do a demo, we only used it for one project and were blown away. DRS Nova is the only thing close and for around $500/month with a license that can be turned on and off at a whim, it's a great tool. 

We still use Phoenix for daily work, along with Resolve for color and some light dirt/dust removal. But for seriously damaged film, PFClean and DRS leave the competition behind in my opinion. I really wish the guys at Digital Vision would add some of those tools to Phoenix. 

Edited July 11, 2025 by Tyler Purcell

[Tyler Purcell]

Here is a sample of something that broke every tool we tried, but PFClean just powered through it. Not only did PF run perfectly on our Apple Silicon systems, meaning it was fast to render, but also it was rock solid performance wise. No crashing, no problems. We were importing raw DPX 16mm 4k material into the system via our NVME raid and it was just a flawless experience. We only tested the software for a few days so we could prove it would work to the client. Not only was I blown away, but so was the client. Hopefully when she finishes raising the money, we can get the film finished. 

Oh and the "original scan" was a non-wet gate scan, to show how good PF Clean was without even a wet gate. 

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/784cdzx4srnqtcybe1y0w/Tarkofsky-fix.mp4?rlkey=71zu2bxxxyypkigsrnjtq3joy&st=xjr0eqq2&dl=0

[Perry Paolantonio]

8 minutes ago, Tyler Purcell said:

Because DryClean is one of the only fully automated tools in the system. 

Dryclean is a dustbusting tool. You're expecting it to do something that it's not expected to do. 

 

9 minutes ago, Tyler Purcell said:

PFClean does not, it's completely automated. It automatically detects scratches because they don't match the background for the most part.

Scratches that weave back and forth are scratches that don't match the background. Phoenix's scratch tools clean these up nicely. 

Scratches that don't weave match the background by definition - because they ARE the background. Automated tools can't clean these up using the same kind of algorithm DryClean or MTI's DRS tools do (looking at surrounding frames, figuring out what's transient by analyzing the motion in the image, and pulling pixels from surrounding frames to seamlessly infill). What they can do is fake it by making up something that wasn't there. AI can probably do this reasonably effectively if you don't care about preserving the original image, but now you're inventing stuff, instead of pulling actual picture data from surrounding frames to conceal something. That's a non-starter for us. 

 

[Perry Paolantonio]

1 hour ago, Tyler Purcell said:

Here is a sample of something that broke every tool we tried, but PFClean just powered through it.

You're making my point. Those scratches are transient --different on every frame-- ao any decent restoration tool can clean those up easily, using the same method they've all been using for the past 25 or more years. With the correct parameters, DryClean would probably get those as well because they're not persistent scratches, they're intermittent. 

The result is seamless because these tools all do basically the same thing: they look at the surrounding frames and they pull in actual picture data to replace what they've detected as scratches. The background in this shot is perfectly static, too, making it even easier to do, because there's no complicated motion happening in the image to throw off the algorithm. I don't think this same result could be achieved if the camera was mid-pan, zoom, or dolly. 

Also, it's Tarkovsky, not Tarkofsky.

Edited July 11, 2025 by Perry Paolantonio

[Perry Paolantonio]

I spent more time compositing the text onto the image than I did cleaning this up in Phoenix. 

• Scratch Target: Default settings but increased column aggressiveness, which detects more
• DryClean: Default settings

3 minutes work to clean this up in Phoenix. It could be a little better but I didn't feel like spending the time on it. 

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/jlepb1kp28gttafzqkl2c/Tarkovsky-GRD.mov?rlkey=a0b7uw6layizbql7g3buqtrzv&st=vlbmph7e&dl=0

[Tyler Purcell]

12 hours ago, Perry Paolantonio said:

AI can probably do this reasonably effectively if you don't care about preserving the original image, but now you're inventing stuff, instead of pulling actual picture data from surrounding frames to conceal something. That's a non-starter for us. 

 

Well, DRS Nova does just this and it works great. Creating entire new frames where there was none using AI. 

12 hours ago, Perry Paolantonio said:

The result is seamless because these tools all do basically the same thing: they look at the surrounding frames and they pull in actual picture data to replace what they've detected as scratches. The background in this shot is perfectly static, too, making it even easier to do, because there's no complicated motion happening in the image to throw off the algorithm. I don't think this same result could be achieved if the camera was mid-pan, zoom, or dolly. 

Yes, I probably shouldn't have sent that clip. I was referring to static scratches rather than moving ones in my commentary, but sent a clip not displaying the results of that. Honestly, I didn't even watch the clip, it was one we made for the client and I had recalled it having a fixed scratch over his face and on a zoom shot. I'm not sure why the sample doesn't have that big green fixed scratch, it must have been the next shot. It was a while ago, so I don't have the raw material anymore, oh well. If we get the job, I will start a thread and show you the issues we've been having and why PF Clean worked better than Phoenix. We only had the PF Clean license for 7 days and we pushed a dozen projects through it, but I don't have copies of them. 

[Perry Paolantonio]

8 hours ago, Tyler Purcell said:

Well, DRS Nova does just this and it works great. Creating entire new frames where there was none using AI. 

Yeah, my point is that our archive clients don't want that. MTI makes great software and I'm sure it looks good, and this is a useful tool in certain situations. But for a film archive that's doing preservation, using AI to generate entire frames is problematic, at best. 

[Tyler Purcell]

7 hours ago, Perry Paolantonio said:

Yeah, my point is that our archive clients don't want that. MTI makes great software and I'm sure it looks good, and this is a useful tool in certain situations. But for a film archive that's doing preservation, using AI to generate entire frames is problematic, at best. 

So what do you feel the archive clients want? Is it just a clean scan with minimum cleanup? 
 

[Perry Paolantonio]

On 7/12/2025 at 6:55 PM, Tyler Purcell said:

So what do you feel the archive clients want? Is it just a clean scan with minimum cleanup? 

It's not a matter of what I "feel" they want. Its what they have told us they want. An archive looking to make a digital preservation copy generally isn't interested in making up picture where it was missing. That's counter to the whole idea of preservation. 

Different clients have different goals though. Often it's just to improve it for projection, so we do a light dustbust and then manually touch up the really egregious defects. But many of them want pristine cleanups, which means a fair bit of manual work - typically about 2-3 weeks for a feature length film. But even at that, a line is typically drawn at recreating entire frames. In some cases we'll be asked to simply duplicate frames to fill a gap, so it's less distracting. for 3 frames this is pretty easy and depending on the amount of camera motion, sometimes it's not even noticeable. You're not making up new picture, but you're maintaining an image on screen without affecting the audio sync so it's less distracting than several frames of black. 

We don't generally de-grain/regrain either, for the same reasons. 

Most of our library and archive customers require two copies of the deliverables: One is the flat scan, ungraded and unrestored. The other is the final graded and restored version. That way they have a high res scan for future use if they need it, but they have a scan restored using today's tools, for presentation. And even if they don't ask for this, we make it a point to recommend that they should, again, just in case.  

That being said, we have had the occasional (rare) client who is working with archival footage in a new production, and they often have different goals. For those clients we have done  stuff like degrain, aggressive dustbusting and smoothing, then regraining. Personally, I don't like the way this looks, but it's what works for their production. I'm sure they would be fine with something AI generated. But we don't do enough of that kind of work to justify paying for those features.