Restart is a Slovenian video production business. They are active in post-production and broadcast design. Restart works in all resolutions from PAL, HD to 2k work for films. Bojan Mastilovic explains: “We are a new company of currently only two people but with more than 15 people that work for us on an event basis.” Restart chose for Final Cut Pro over Adobe products, and for a good reason too.

Restart’s recent work is a complete digital restoration of the best Slovenian film ever made called “Ples v dezju” from 1961 (translated: “Dance in the Rain"), which was in a really bad condition. Restart made it look like new.

“Other stuff we have done are numerous special effects sequences for Slovenian movies,” says Bojan. “We have done all 2k digital post production of a 20-minute film called “Marmelade”. All editing, color correction and special effects were done on 2k resolution in LOG color space.”

Bojan tells me that this was the first movie ever done that way ever in his country and even in all other former Yugoslavian countries. Restart als has done opening titles for numerous TV shows and even for the 100th anniversary of film in Slovenia. And it’s all done using Apple’s Final Cut Pro.

These days Restart is gearing toward digital color grading, so they purchased a copy of FinalTouch HD from Silicon Color. FinalTouch HD features a set of tools created to meet the needs of SD and HD video producers, including native QuickTime support, integrated content management, layered workflow, non-destructive grading, and a powerful rendering system.

Bojan isn’t doing HD work yet: “I can’t tell much about HD because not even one television in our country is broadcasting in HD so all we do is downsample the HD or HDV material to SD and then work on effects and design.”

I asked Bojan about the conversion and he told me they are doing it with Final Cut Pro, Shake, and Combustion. “What we would like to have in these applications is more interactivity and a “finishing architecture” from effects like for example Discreet smoke into the editing products.”

Bojan would like a kind of half-editing, half-composting system, because he finds jumping from Final Cut Pro to Shake or Combustion and back to be a pure loss of time.

Bojan explained how they work:

• We often have to make video footage look like film so this involves field merge and some color corrections.


• We capture material in Final Cut Pro and make edits there.


• After that we export it and do a field merge in Combustion.


• Then we make a mask in Combustion or Photoshop and play with power windows.


• That means we are jumping from application to application - or better said from one computer to another all the time.

Restart had to restore the “Dancing in the Rain” movie. The film was due to be released on a DVD so the output was PAL and that is what Restart restored to (PAL Digibeta).

Bojan: “We used a system called Archangel that deals with dirt and scratches in real time, so we made one pass in Archangel, then we scanned the whole thing to PAL Targa frames—about 140.000 of them-- and then painted the entire movie frame by frame in Combustion and Photoshop.”

It took about one month. Bojan’s main problem with the movie was the rain. As the movie title says, the story is filmed on rainy days, so Restart could not use automatic tools for dirt removal, but instead had to paint all the frames by hand. “If we would have used automatic tools they would have removed the rain from the movie.”

Bojan had a lot of things going bad with this project. He saw all of his frames going awry because of a failing FireWire disk drive.

He also found out about Final Cut Pro’s apparent edge over Adobe’s video editing tools: “Another thing that went bad was when we were working to load the DVD data onto a DLT tape. We had finished authoring on a PC with Adobe Encore, but the PC came without a SCSI card, so we ported the project to a machine that had such a card. When we opened the project and tried to print it to DLT, Encore returned an error --on the Adobe forum they said projects cannot be transferred with Encore because there is no tool for reconnecting media available in the software.”

Restart has a web site. Currently, it still is a Slovenian-only site, but Bojan is working on having the site translated into English: Restart Production