02 / 07Clean plates
Paint & Prep
What the camera should have seen.
Rig, marker and stunt pad removal, camera and crew reflections, slimming and beauty work, and clean-plate reconstruction — so compositing starts from a frame that needs no apologies.
What Paint & Prep does
Paint and prep rebuilds the frame before compositing touches it. Tracking markers, rigs, stunt pads, camera and crew reflections and set damage come out, performers get slimming and beauty work where the brief asks for it, and what was behind them is reconstructed from other frames, other angles or by hand, and it has to stay stable across the whole shot.
You send
Plates, reference stills if you have them, and a mark-up of what needs to disappear.
We rebuild
Clean plates from temporal or projected reconstruction, painted where nothing else will do, tracked to the camera.
You get
Prepped plates at source resolution and bit depth, with a difference matte so you can see exactly what changed.
Clean plates
Before / After
Drag to see
the prep
The lighting stands on both sides of frame and the marker grid across the backdrop came out in prep, before a single wire was touched.
Stand removal
Both C-stands and heads painted out
Marker cleanup
Tracking crosses removed after the solve
Clean plate
Backdrop reconstructed and projected
Difference matte
Shipped with the plate
Process
Brief to
final delivery
Five stages, the same five every time. Open a stage to see what it means on a paint & prep show.
01
Brief
What the shot has to do, what you are sending, and when it has to be back.
On a Paint & Prep show
A marked-up frame per shot showing every removal, and a note on any texture we will need to invent.
02
Analysis
Plates conformed and QC'd, every shot banded by complexity and given a method before work starts.
On a Paint & Prep show
Each removal classified as a temporal patch, a projected clean plate, or hand paint, and bid accordingly.
03
Production
One supervisor, one pipeline, daily versions on your review platform.
On a Paint & Prep show
Clean plates built per camera move, projected back through the track, with paint on top for anything the projection cannot cover.
04
QC
Checked at full resolution, frame by frame, against the delivery document.
On a Paint & Prep show
Flicker, boil and stabilisation checked at full res on a loop, plus a difference-matte pass to prove only the target changed.
05
Final Delivery
Colour-managed, versioned, named to your convention and archived for the life of the show.
On a Paint & Prep show
Prepped plates in your source format and colour space, plus difference mattes and the clean plates themselves.
Technical Showcase
How the work
actually gets done
- Technique01
Temporal reconstruction
An occluded area rebuilt from the frames where it was visible, so the patch carries real grain and real light.
- Technique02
Projected clean plates
A single painted frame projected through the matchmove, so a removal stays locked through a camera move.
- Technique03
Slimming & beauty
Body reshaping and skin work on warps tracked to the performer, so the change moves with them and reads as the shot, not a filter.
- Technique04
Stunt pad removal
Crash mats, knee and elbow pads and padding under wardrobe taken out, with the ground, costume and body line rebuilt behind them.
- Technique05
Camera & crew reflections
Camera, operator and crew taken out of glass, chrome, car bodies and eyes, with the reflected scene rebuilt so the surface still reads.
- Tools06
Nuke & Mocha
Planar tracks for the patches, Nuke for projection and paint, so prep and comp live in the same tree.
- Quality control07
Difference mattes
Every delivery ships with a matte of what we changed. Nothing else in the frame is allowed to move.
- Quality control08
Grain-matched paint
Painted regions get the plate's grain structure back, so nothing goes soft or plastic under a heavy grade.
- Production09
Split-screens & wipes
Takes combined in one pass: the best moment from each, blended so nobody can find the seam.
In the Pipeline
Where Paint & Prep
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.