Digital Video - December 2007 - (Page 18) REVIEW SYNTHEYES 2007 1/2 SynthEyes identifies trackable pixels (“blips”) and converts the most stable into full trackers. TRACK AND FIELD ADD SPECIAL EFFECTS TO SHOTS WITH SYNTHEYES MOTION-TRACKING SOFTWARE. BY JOHN JACKMAN ‘W e’ll fix it in post!” is the production battle cry that’s guaranteed to blow your postproduction budget. Any shot with motion, whether it’s shoulder-mounted, dolly, or a simple pan, will require some sort of motion tracking to cover up that ugly cell phone tower or other undesirable blip. If you’ve ever had the unmitigated joy of trying to do precise motion tracking with the tools in After Effects, you’ll appreciate SynthEyes. Of course, fixing ugly objects really isn’t the major use for camera tracking and matchmove; movie special effects now depend upon some method of matching the inserted 3D effect to the original footage. The most accurate and reliable way of doing this is through actual data capture as the camera moves (motion capture) SCORE SYNTHEYES 2007 1/2 PROS: Affordable, powerful motion tracking with 3D output. CONS: Weaker for 2-1/2D tracking of tripod shots. BOTTOM LINE: Packed with features found in much-higher-priced solutions, SynthEyes delivers solid value. MSRP: $399 CONTACT: Andersson Technologies, www.ssontech.com or data from a robotic camera control, but this is typically very expensive and confined to a specially-equipped studio. Most special effects have to matchmove through a sort of forensic process of analyzing the video or digital intermediate, tracking identifiable pixels, and then performing some pretty complex math to calculate their depth in 3D space. SynthEyes 2007 1/2 is a standalone software system that does just this, tracking pixels in an existing shot and reconstructing camera motion mathematically. It’s designed to do this best with true 3D camera motion (dolly, crane, or handheld), where the camera actually moves in the scene. While SynthEyes can do effective single-point tracking (2D) and reconstruction of tripod pans and tilts (2 1/2D), it shines when it actually has camera motion to reconstruct the depth of the shot. The system also works best when there are some clear tracking marks in the scene with strong contrast to surrounding background. Since a great deal of matchmoving is based on bluescreen or greenscreen shots, SynthEyes includes a special greenscreen tracking mode, where the user can select trackers only in the screen area, ignoring the actors. This is a plus, since such scenes can become hard to track when the most visible motion is that of the actors. You can use SynthEyes for both automatic tracking (where www.dv.com 18 dv december 2007 http://www.ssontech.com http://www.dv.com
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