07 / 07Beauty & plate cleanup
Cleanup
Everything the frame is better without.
Dust, scratches, dead pixels, crew reflections, tape marks and beauty work — removed frame by frame without touching anything else.
What Cleanup does
Cleanup is the last mile of the invisible work: sensor dust, lens hairs, dead pixels, a crew reflection in a window, a boom shadow, a logo that did not clear, a blemish the director noticed in the DI. Small on their own, and the whole reason the frame reads as finished.
You send
Plates and a shot-level list of what bothers you, or ask us to run a sweep and report back.
We clean
Sensor and lens artefacts, reflections, continuity errors and beauty passes, tracked and grain-matched.
You get
Cleaned plates at source resolution, with a difference matte and a per-shot log of every change made.
Beauty & plate cleanup
Before / After
Drag to see
the cleanup
Stands, markers and rig out of frame is prep. The dust-bust, the floor seam and the last stray highlight are cleanup.
Dust-bust
Sensor dust and lens hairs removed
Floor seam
Cyclorama join painted out
Continuity
Stray highlights matched across takes
Change log
Every fix listed per shot
Process
Brief to
final delivery
Five stages, the same five every time. Open a stage to see what it means on a cleanup show.
01
Brief
What the shot has to do, what you are sending, and when it has to be back.
On a Cleanup show
Your list, or ours: a sweep pass at full res that reports every artefact before any of it is touched.
02
Analysis
Plates conformed and QC'd, every shot banded by complexity and given a method before work starts.
On a Cleanup show
Each item classified — static artefact, tracked object, continuity fix, beauty — and bundled by method, so the bid is honest.
03
Production
One supervisor, one pipeline, daily versions on your review platform.
On a Cleanup show
Dust-busting and static fixes first, then tracked removals and beauty passes, all grain-matched to the plate.
04
QC
Checked at full resolution, frame by frame, against the delivery document.
On a Cleanup show
Looped at full res with a difference matte, and a second pair of eyes on beauty work, where too much is as wrong as too little.
05
Final Delivery
Colour-managed, versioned, named to your convention and archived for the life of the show.
On a Cleanup show
Cleaned plates in your source format, difference mattes and a per-shot log of exactly what changed and where.
Technical Showcase
How the work
actually gets done
- Technique01
Dust-bust & dead pixels
Frame-level artefacts removed with temporal fills, so nothing pops or smears.
- Technique02
Reflection removal
Crew, camera and lights taken out of glass, chrome and eyes, with the surface rebuilt behind them.
- Technique03
Beauty passes
Skin, hair and continuity work that reads as good lighting rather than as retouching.
- Tools04
Nuke paint & projection
Static fixes painted once and projected through the track; tracked fixes handled per frame.
- Quality control05
Change log per shot
Every delivery lists what was changed and where, so a note in the DI can be traced to a frame.
- Production06
Sweep and report
We can run the sweep before you brief us and hand back a list. It is usually longer than anyone expects.
In the Pipeline
Where Cleanup
sits
Every discipline hands the next one something. Hover a stage to see what it passes on, and click through to it.
- 01RotoscopyMattes hand compositing a clean edge for light wrap, grade isolation and CG integration.
- 02Paint & PrepA clean, stable plate that lets keying, matchmove and compositing work on the shot instead of on the rig.
- 03Wire RemovalA rig-free plate that keying and compositing can treat as if the stunt was never wired.
- 04CleanupA finished plate: nothing added, nothing left that the frame did not need.
- 05KeyingA clean alpha that lets compositing wrap the new background around the subject without a halo.
- 06MatchmoveA locked camera and undistort maps that let compositing place CG, set extensions and clean-plate projections with confidence.
- 072D CompositingThe finished frame — graded, checked and delivered as EXR or DPX to spec.
- 08FinalGraded, checked frame by frame, delivered to spec and archived for the life of the show.
Why AronFX
The standard
every frame
leaves under
- 01
Precision
Nothing leaves the building without a supervisor pass at full resolution. We check the frame the way a DI theatre will, not the way a browser player will.
- 02
Consistency
One methodology per sequence, written down before work starts, so the last shot matches the first even when a dozen artists touched them.
- 03
Scalability
Departments sized for volume and staffed to the difficulty of the shot, so a 500-shot show gets a schedule you can hold us to.
- 04
Technical expertise
Nuke-native and ACES colour-managed, with lens distortion, survey alignment and multi-pass integration handled as routine rather than as a special request.
- 05
Production workflow
Plate intake and technical QC within 24 hours, shot-level bidding with complexity banding, and a named supervisor on every show.
- 06
Quality assurance
Frame-by-frame checks against the delivery document, a difference matte with every prep delivery, and final review on a calibrated display at delivery resolution.
- 07
Client collaboration
We work inside your pipeline — ftrack, Syncsketch, Aspera, your naming convention, your delivery document. You should never have to learn ours.
Next Project
Have a VFX
project in mind?
Send us a cut, a plate or a shot count. You will hear back from the supervisor who would run your show, with a breakdown, a schedule and a number.