American Cinematographer - August 2011 - 80

general manager of FotoKem’s N extLab. “As an expert who has been involved with the use of emerging and evolving camera technologies,he became an early leader in mobile systems supporting file-based workflows on location … All of us at FotoKem are very excited about this collaboration, and see it as a great way to have an industry leader represent us in the Midwest.” For additional information, visit www.fotokem.com and www.fletch.com. Arri, Tweak Integrate High Dynamic Range Support Tweak Software and Arri have announced a collaboration to integrate high-dynamic-range color support for Arri’s Alexa digital camera into Tweak’s tools for playback, dailies and transcoding, including RV, Tweak’s image and sequence viewer for visual-effects and animation artists.RV’s high-performance toolset is built on an open, extensible architecture, allowing users to adapt the software to their own pipelines and styles of working. “The Alexa’s astonishing dynamic

range and wide color gamut make it a great source for visual-effects plates and elements,” says Seth Rosenthal, co-founder of Tweak Software. “RV’s floating point, high-dynamic-range image pipeline, linearlight workflow and uncompromised color handling are a natural match for Alexa imagery in a high-end visual-effects pipeline.” For additional information, visit www.arri.com and www.tweaksoft ware.com. Lightcraft Offers Free Photogrammetry Tools Lightcraft Technology, a developer of real-time visual-effects technology, is making its photogrammetry tools available free-of-charge to the company’s clients and to members of the filmmaking community. Lightcraft created a specific set of photogrammetry tools for developing photorealistic sets and digital assets for use in Previzion, the company’s real-time visualeffects system, which provides a combination of high-precision camera tracking, ally, by increasing the amount of useful data available in compositing, the toolset provides greater efficiencies by reducing the amount of rendering typically required from CGI departments. For example, the generation of holdout mattes for individual CGI objects or characters can be performed within Nuke itself, resulting in hundreds of hours of savings on large-scale projects that prominently feature CG assets. “Working with The Foundry to have our tools integrated into the core of N uke ensures that the rest of the industry has immediate access to this technology,” says Peter Hillman, the lead developer for the deep-compositing workflow at Weta Digital. “This integration, together with the collaborative effort between Weta Digital and other leading [visual-effects] studios to integrate deep data into the OpenEXR format, helps establish a true cross-industry standard for utilizing deep data.” Nuke 6.3 supports deep data within the node graph and contains a range of deep-compositing nodes. For more information, visit www.thefoundry.co.uk/nuke.

The Foundry Brings Weta Compositing to Nuke Following The Foundry’s collaboration with Weta Digital on the Mari 3-D texture-painting technology, the two companies have entered into an agreement to bring to Nuke the deep-compositing technology developed by Weta for Avatar. Deep compositing allows artists working with CGI material to process and composite “deep images” containing multiple opacity or color samples per pixel at different depths. In addition to enabling new creative possibilities in compositing, such as volumetric effects, the technique leads to higher-quality imagery when integrating and finishing CGI rendered elements. Addition80 August 2011

sophisticated rendering and visual-effectsquality keying for on-set compositing of virtual backgrounds and CG characters. The same photogrammetry tools can also be used with other 3-D graphics applications. “Lightcraft’s photogrammetry tools are a complete set of Maya plug-ins, scripts and shaders that are designed to import standard photogrammetry data, undistort projected images, assist in the modeling of accurate reference geometry and then bake the resulting projections into standard texture maps with the appropriate models,” explains Eliot Mack, Lightcraft’s founder and Previzion architect. “This process dramatically speeds up the creation of complete, portable, photorealistic 3-D models that can be rendered in real time. Our photogrammetry tools make it possible for a single person to go out with a DSLR and capture enough stills to create a photorealistic 3-D background model.” Lightcraft also recently announced a number of new features for Previzion, including real-time visualization of multiple animated characters and moving objects from Autodesk’s MotionBuilder via Lightcraft’s Prelink plug-in; 3-D drawable tracking mattes with assignable custom matte attributes such as garbage matteing and color de-spill; integrated multi-system synchronization; stereo metadata capture and analysis tools, including accurate computation of true IO and convergence distance; encoded crane support for use with Encodacam and Kuper interfaces; expanded rendering using CGFX shaders for reflection, bump and normal mapping, and advanced lighting effects; improved real-time keying with Add/Mix matte controls; full support for stage and location optical tracking; expanded video-format support; in-camera motion blur on virtual elements; dual-selectable HD outputs, including composited image and matte channel; and support for rendering five to 10 simultaneous HD video streams as background plates and textures. For additional information, visit www.lightcrafttech.com. ●

American Cinematographer
http://www.fotokem.com http://www.fletch.com http://www.arri.com http://www.tweaksoftware.com http://www.tweaksoftware.com http://www.lightcrafttech.com http://www.thefoundry.co.uk/nuke
American Cinematographer - August 2011

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of American Cinematographer - August 2011
