Studio l'Equipe chooses Snell & Wilcox

Studio l'Equipe, a video and audio post-production firm based in Brussels, is using the Snell & Wilcox Archangel Ph.C Real-Time Motion-Compensated Video Archive Processor and Ukon Universal Conversion Platform to streamline and expand the company's digital workflow for film restoration and digital cinema applications.
"The acquisition of Archangel has enabled us to attract customers -- such as museums and film archives -- that are very concerned about creating high-quality masters of valuable film assets," said Dominique Marcel, video department supervisor for Studio l'Equipe. "These clients want to preserve the best possible video images, and they understand that Archangel offers the tools necessary to achieve that standard. Archangel helps us bring new life to classic images and prepare them for re-release or distribution on DVD."
Snell & Wilcox's Archangel is a real-time restoration system with the ability to correct artifacts using motion compensation working on both 525- and 625-originated material. Located at the centre of the facility's SD operations, Archangel allows Studio l'Equipe staff to improve film masters for archiving or mastering by cleaning up, fixing, and stabilising - in real-time - any video material that has deteriorated or been damaged.
The system is capable of restoring typical material within two or three times its running length, producing images that often are better than the original when it was first shot.
The Ukon system at Studio l'Equipe enables operators to encode SD images from events such as concerts and upgrade them to HD quality for digital cinema viewing. Ukon can be configured to provide upconversion, downconversion, and crossconversion (SD-to-SD or HD-to-HD) singly or in any combination. Designed for applications in which precise lip-sync and time-code integrity are important considerations, Ukon manages audio requirements including embedded, AES, and compressed audio formats and carries out time-code conversion with the reassurance of exact frame mapping.
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