Ascent Media Management services in London have been using mokey for its restoration projects for the past 6 months and according to Chris Watson, Ascent's Technical Manager "it has become an essential tool in our ever growing restoration business." For Ascent the restoration are an important part of the business and it is constantly seeking to improve the quality of the results along with delivering on time.

Ascent first came across mokey early in 2003 when looking for solutions to complement their MTI system, which included hair in gate problems and frame stretching or jumps. Chris adds: "at the time mokey looked promising but did not have all the solutions we required, however within a few months the Imagineer team came out with version 3. This really did solve these problems and even had solutions we were not expecting like grain tools."

The workflow for the restoration team involves bringing the project in from tape or film (via telecine) and running it through one of their three MTI systems. This restores a large percentage of the content but inevitably there are elements that cannot be completed in this environment. These problem sequences are then exported to the mokey software.

For hair in gate shots Ascent use the tracker to quickly track the problem area and then using the 'remove module' removes the hair and paints in the background, "previously this kind of work involved us either having to send it to another department, which was very time consuming or leave them in which was often disappointing for the client".

For frame jumps or stretching they use the tracker again and then the 'stabilise module' which very quickly stabilises the shot but also refills the edges removing the need to zoom up the frame which can cause grain issues as well as a loss of quality.

Ascent also uses the 'grainsurgery module' for adding, removing and matching grain. After removing elements the grain tools are used to match the grain of the newly recovered background area to the surrounding area. They also use it to help with difficult shots; "it sometimes proves easier to remove grain from a shot before starting to give a better result for tracking and then matching the grain back at the end".

Ascent have used mokey on over 10 projects with more happening all the time, these have included removing hair in gate on "Elton John Live in Moscow" and stabilizing frames for the HD feature "All Quiet on the Western Front" both for Carlton. They have also stabilized shots for Capital Films "The Gathering".

Chris concludes; "mokey really has saved us time on these projects, it is efficient at both HD and 2k resolutions where until now this type of repair would have been unthinkable."