How Duplitech Scales Restoration Without Losing Craft

Inside Duplitech’ s Workflow with Loki Render

Film restoration has a reputation for being slow, meticulous, and—if we’re honest—a little painful. Frame by frame. Decision by decision. Bottlenecks everywhere.

But what happens when you introduce serious processing power into that world—not to replace the craft, but to remove the friction?

We caught up with Steve Johnson, COOat Duplitech to talk about workflow, scale, and the tools quietly changing how restoration gets done.

WHO’S DUPLITECH?

From their Headquarters in Torrance, CA to offices in Burbank & Manila in the Philippines, Duplitech has built a reputation as one of the industry’s leading preservation and restoration specialists, helping Hollywood Studios, Archives, Distributors, Streaming Platforms & Content Owners breathe new life into film and television libraries.

From film scanning and restoration through to colour grading, mastering and delivery, the company combines traditional restoration expertise with modern technology to make valuable content accessible to new audiences across streaming, broadcast and theatrical platforms. As the global market for restoration services continues to grow, Duplitech is expanding both its technology stack and global footprint to keep pace.

PF: When people think about restoration, they think craft. What they don’t see is workflow. Where are the real pressure points?

Steve: People see the finished frame and think about the visible craft: colour work, grain management, damage repair. That’s central to restoration. But what they don’t see is the scale of the workflow behind it. Every restored frame carries a huge amount of processing, data movement, rendering, review, and coordination. At scale, restoration is not only about quality; it’s about throughput.

At Duplitech,we’ve more than a hundred films moving through the pipeline at any given time, with teams in the U.S. and Manila working across time zones, essentially around the clock. When you’re dealing with hundreds of hours of content and hundreds of terabytes of data, small delays compound very quickly. The real pressure point is making sure the workflow supports the craft.

Every creative decision an operator makes must move through the pipeline — rendered, reviewed, and advanced to the next stage. Our goal is to free our restoration artists to spend more of their time applying their creative judgment and technical expertise, while the processing, rendering, and movement of data happen as efficiently as possible behind the scenes.

PF: At what point did you start looking for something to ease that pressure?

Steve: We were already handling high volumes of restoration work before Loki Render, but there comes a point where the traditional workflow simply doesn’t scale.

When an operator completes a creative pass, the best use of their time is moving on to the next restoration decision — not waiting for a workstation to finish rendering. Across a large team, multiple projects, and teams working in the U.S. and Manila, that kind of friction adds up quickly.

We needed a centralized way to manage rendering and processing so our operators could stay focused on the work that requires their judgment, experience, and creative skill. That’s where Loki Render became such an important part of the workflow. It works in the background, keeping projects moving through the pipeline so the team can keep doing the highest-value work.

PF: Where does Loki Render fit into the day-to-day workflow for your team?

Steve: Loki Render fits directly into Filmworkz’ Phoenix Restoration & Colour, where our operators already do their restoration work. Once an operator finishes a pass, they can send it to Loki from within the Phoenix interface, offload the render to another machine, and immediately move on to the next task.

^{Phoenix UI with Send to Loki Button}

That keeps the workstation free and keeps the operator focused on the work that requires their creative judgment and technical expertise. Behind the scenes, Loki automatically balances jobs across the available render nodes, without requiring someone to manually manage the process. It also gives us one centralized view of everything that’s running — a single pane of glass across the workflow. That’s especially important with teams in the U.S. and Manila working across time zones. Everyone can continue working and rendering concurrently without creating bottlenecks for one another.

It sounds simple, but it changes the rhythm of the work. Instead of working around processing time, the team can stay focused on the restoration itself. Across hundreds of hours of content, that makes a meaningful difference.

PF: What changed once it was in place?

Steve: Once Loki Render was in place, rendering became a natural extension of the workflow rather than something our operators had to actively manage. They could finish a pass, send it to Loki Render, and move directly into the next creative task. That was the real shift. The processing was happening elsewhere, on another node, while the operator was already focused on the next restoration decision.

At our scale, that has a meaningful compounding effect. Turnaround times improved, jobs stopped backing up, and our operators were able to stay in their creative flow instead of being interrupted by the mechanics of rendering. Loki Render helped remove friction from the process, allowing our team to spend more time applying their creative and technical expertise and less time managing what happens in the background.

PF: You’re handling a huge range of content—from archival film to modern digital. How important is consistency?

Steve: Consistency is essential at our scale. We handle a very wide range of content, from fragile archival film elements that may have been stored for decades to modern digital workflows with completely different technical requirements.

What Loki Render gives us is predictability. When we send a job into the pipeline, we have confidence that it will run correctly, complete properly, and produce the output we expect. That matters because small inconsistencies can become major issues when you are managing hundreds of titles concurrently. You cannot afford surprises. A predictable processing environment allows our team to keep projects moving with confidence, regardless of the source format or complexity of the material.

PF: There’s always a fear that tools like this replace craft. Is that happening?

Steve: That’s one of the questions I hear most often, and the reality is the opposite of what people fear. The craft is still entirely human. Loki’s not making creative decisions. It’s removing the non-creative friction around the process: the waiting, the resource juggling, and the manual management of render queues. That gives our artists and operators more time and focus for the decisions that require their judgment.

Those are the decisions that matter most: colour, grain, damage repair, restoration judgment calls, and making sure the image supports the story the way it should.

PF: Zooming out—what does this kind of workflow unlock for the future?

Steve: The demand for restored content isn’t slowing down. Streaming platforms need more content, UHD has raised the quality bar, and global distribution means titles that once lived in a single market are now being viewed everywhere. That means more titles, higher expectations, and tighter timelines — all while protecting the quality of the work and the capacity of the team.

Smarter workflow infrastructure is how you meet that demand without simply throwing more people at the problem. It allows you to scale more intelligently, keep artists focused on the decisions that matter, and move content through the pipeline with greater speed and consistency.

That’s where tools like Loki become genuinely strategic. They’re not just about rendering faster; they’re about building a workflow that can support the future of restoration at scale.

PF: One thing Loki Render solved that people wouldn’t expect?
SJ: The load balancing. People expect faster rendering, but they may not realize how much efficiency comes from automatically distributing work across available nodes. No one has to decide which job goes where. Loki Render handles that in the background, and that quietly saves a lot of time.

PF: Most underrated part of workflow efficiency?
SJ: Keeping operators in their creative flow. You can solve a lot of workflow problems with more time, more people, or more hardware. But if your artists are constantly being pulled away from their work to manage processing, you’re losing focus — and that’s much harder to get back.

PF:What keeps you up at night?
SJ: Automation at the intake level. We’re just starting to use the full version of Filmworkz Loki with the watch folder processing feature, where hundreds of assets can be dropped into a folder and processed automatically, without an operator having to initiate each job. That’s the next frontier for us and we’re excited to see where it takes us.

^{Loki from Filmworkz is the full-featured application designed for managing and automating restoration, post-production, archive, and distribution workflows. It integrates directly with Phoenix Restoration & Colour, supports watch folders, allows users to create and edit DVO and export presets, provides variable export settings, includes a preview window, and offers a complete control panel for configuring and monitoring jobs. Loki Render, by contrast, is a streamlined rendering service intended primarily for Phoenix users who want to minimise downtime. It receives jobs from Phoenix (“Send to Loki”), but does not include watch folders, preview capabilities, or workflow configuration tools. Export settings are controlled from the Phoenix interface, and Loki Render is mainly used for monitoring and executing renders using predefined export presets rather than creating or managing workflows.}

The best tools are the ones you don’t notice. They don’t shout; they don’t demand attention — they just quietly remove friction until suddenly everything runs better. That’s how we think about Loki Render & honestly, that’s how we think about the work we do at Duplitech. Get out of the way of the creative. Let the technology do its job. And increasingly, that’s where the whole industry is heading.

Find Duplitech in your Pocket
See their work, connect directly, and understand how high-end restoration actually gets delivered.
Curious about Loki & Loki Render?
If you want to see how it fits into your own workflow, you can try it yourself.
Find Filmworkz in your Pocket