Arion chooses Edifis Graduate and Scratchbox

A leading UK postproduction and duplication company Arion Facilities has purchased an Edifis Graduate telecine server and Scratchbox image retouching system for installation at its premises near Deluxe Laboratories in Denham Media Park.
Arion General Manager Dave Loades said: "The Edifis Graduate and Scratchbox provide very welcome support to our range of services which include linear and non-linear editing, telecine transfer, video encoding, VHS, CD and DVD duplication and VT mastering. Both systems have a proven reputation for reliability, versatility and operational speed. They are being used to process rushes, graded and final transfers in Arion's digital telecine suite, sourcing from our Philips Shadow.
“Our first big project with the Edifis equipment was to produce a restored premaster of the Orson Welles classic 'Citizen Kane' for DVD. This involved removing thousands of spots and hairs which would otherwise have taken weeks to remove in a linear edit suite. Scratchbox made the restoration process much easier and incomparably faster."
The Edifis Scratchbox consists of two video disk recorders with an internal mixer/compositor, internal mask layer and paint software allowing fast and efficient image retouching. A soft-edged matte is painted using the integral tablet and pen. The operator composites the foreground and background layers using this key. The resultant frame is re-recorded at the press of a single button. Unlike a VTR, there are no pre-rolls and no degradation of image quality. On-screen menus coupled with a dedicated control panel, jog wheel and transport buttons allow individual operators to choose the way they wish to work. All functions relating to frame retouching can be performed entirely from the tablet and pen interface paralleled by dedicated fast-access keys.
Graduate allows telecine colourists to grade film to disk in any reel order, simultaneously conforming the video/audio clips and playing out to another application. Graduate is equipped with two independent uncompressed video, audio and source timecode channels. When used with a colour corrector such as Pandora's Pogle, Graduate replaces a dedicated stillstore and disk recorder. An integral generator and mixer allow comparison of frames from different scenes as well as saving the cost of an external third-party mixer.
The Graduate purchased by Arion incorporates four hours storage of full uncompressed 10-bit video and audio in one 4 U box allows multiple projects and work-in-progress to be easily stored.
The Edifis Graduate and Scratchbox were ordered via London-based reseller C2.
(SP)