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The PFClean Development Record

A decade on the record.

Two decades of restoration software, developed in the open and answerable to the people who use it.

Since 2002, PFClean has been built on a single principle: a restoration is only as good as its faithfulness to the original. Every release in the record below — every feature, every fix — serves that principle. This page is our public changelog: what shipped, when, and why.

We publish it because we think a restoration tool should be judged on its record, not its press releases.

How PFClean is developed

Three things shape every PFClean release.

Your projects outlive software versions — so we make sure PFClean honours them. Archive restoration work spans years, sometimes decades. The release record below includes repeated, deliberate work on loading and parsing projects created in much earlier versions of PFClean — including projects carrying metadata formats from years past. When you open a PFClean project, it opens. That is a promise we keep in code, release after release.

Support tickets drive development. You’ll notice support ticket references printed directly in our release notes (PFT001657, PFT001665, PFT001672, PFT001694…). That isn’t decoration. Issues raised by working restoration artists go into the development queue and come out the other side as documented fixes, traceable from your report to the shipped build.

Fidelity, not fabrication. Much of the industry is now racing to generate image content with AI — inventing frames, hallucinating detail that was never on the negative. PFClean’s development effort goes the other way: deterministic, artist-controlled tools that recover what the film actually holds. What you deliver to a broadcaster, a streamer or an archive is the film — not a model’s guess at it.

Release history

2026

PFClean 26.06.09

Answers inside the toolset - and cleaner paint and de-flicker

Feature Release

2025

PFClean 25.11.13

Remaster editing you can lean on, all day

Maintenance Release

PFClean 25.01.23

Colour-managed confidence, from monitor to master

Maintenance Release

2024

PFClean 24.09.24

Your archive projects, honoured - years later

Maintenance Release

PFClean 24.07.23

From your support ticket to a shipped build

Maintenance Release

PFClean 24.06.14

Backwards compatibility, maintained on purpose

Maintenance Release

PFClean 24.06.06

Broader platforms, faster conform, cleaner exports

Feature Release

2023

PFClean 23.08.16

Built-in learning, faster Windows encoding, safer exports

Feature Release

PFClean 23.04.04

Polish across the Cinema, on every platform

Maintenance Release

PFClean 23.03.27

Native on Apple Silicon, colour-managed to ACES 1.3

Milestone Release

2022

PFClean 22.08.18

Dialled in for Apple M1 - hardware encoding you can trust

Maintenance Release

PFClean 22.05.20

Colour primaries preserved, support tools sharpened

Maintenance Release

PFClean 22.03.08

Colour-managed exports, corrected

Maintenance Release

PFClean 22.02.21

Reported, fixed, shipped - in five days

Maintenance Release

PFClean 22.02.16

Reference monitoring and a stronger colour pipeline

Feature Release

2021

PFClean 2021.11.09

Support, built into the software

Feature Release

PFClean 2021.10.28

Broader GPU coverage, flexible licensing connections

Maintenance Release

PFClean 2021.10.14

Crisp on every display

Feature Release

PFClean 2021.08.25

Working cleanly, even offline

Maintenance Release

PFClean 2021.08.04

The performance release: batch integrated, exporters rebuilt

Milestone Release

2018

PFClean 2018.11.05

Clearer answers when exports go wrong

Maintenance Release

PFClean 2018.08.09

Project stewardship: snapshotting, archiving, standards

Milestone Release

2017

PFClean 2017.09.01

The full ProRes 422 family

Feature Release

PFClean 2017.02.06

The Digital Wet Gate - the lab technique, reimagined

Milestone Release

2016

PFClean 2016.11.04

Telerack stability on de-interlaced media

Maintenance Release

PFClean 2016.10.14

Baselight integration - included, not sold

Feature Release

PFClean 2016.07.29

Smarter temporal painting

Feature Release

PFClean 2016.07.01

Workflow Manager refinements

Feature Release

PFClean 2016.06.24

Faster temporal effect stacks

Maintenance Release

PFClean 2016.06.17

Disk caching that never blocks the artist

Feature Release

PFClean 2016.05.20

Legibility in the Telerack

Maintenance Release

PFClean 2016.05.09

The modern PFClean arrives: Workflow Manager, Workbench, Telerack

Milestone Release

What's next: innovation is the through-line

The record above is the visible edge of a longer story. When PFClean arrived in the mid-2000s, it brought a set of industry firsts to a market dominated by rigid technical tools — and those firsts didn’t stay firsts for long. They became the baseline:

Pioneered In PFClean

A fully non-destructive metadata workflow — every fix recorded, reversible and auditable, with the source material untouched

Pioneered In PFClean

Fully automated dustbusting with per-fix QA metadata — restoration you can inspect, verify and sign off, frame by frame

Pioneered In PFClean

A complete conform and editing toolset inside the restoration environment — scan to deliverable in one system

Look at an archive restoration tender today and you’ll find these same capabilities written in as standard requirements: non-destructive processing, auditable QA reporting, verified reversibility. The bar archives now hold every vendor to is one PFClean helped set — refined through workflows at facilities and national archives across the world, from 8mm home movies to IMAX 70mm negatives.

That capacity to innovate isn’t confined to one product. The Pixel Farm’s imaging technology is developed and proven across equally unforgiving industries — feature-film visual effects, where our tools have served Oscar-winning pipelines for over twenty years and a sub-pixel error means a failed shot; cultural heritage documentation; and precision applications from forensic presentation to engineering-grade reconstruction. Advances made for one demanding discipline flow across the whole portfolio — and restoration is a direct beneficiary.

And we are not done. We are constantly evaluating new market opportunities and new applications for our core technology, with the same test we’ve applied for two decades: does it serve fidelity, and does it serve the people doing the work? The releases above are a record — they are not the whole story. There is plenty still to come.

The best evidence isn’t a changelog — it’s your own footage.

FAQ

  • PFClean receives regular maintenance and feature releases, each documented on this page. Updates are driven by user support tickets and by The Pixel Farm’s long-term development programme.

  • Yes. Backwards compatibility with older project files and metadata formats is an ongoing, documented commitment — several releases in the record above exist specifically to keep old projects loading correctly.

  • PFClean’s restoration tools are deterministic and artist-controlled. They recover image content from the source material rather than generating new content, so your deliverables contain the film — not synthesised detail.

  • No. PFClean is sold on perpetual licences (Solo, Studio and Enterprise). Updates for permanent Enterprise licences are provided under a current maintenance contract.

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