Imagineer Systems will be debuting monet, its new product for broadcast, film and video post-production, for the first time at NAB in Las Vegas April 19-22. monet is a start-to-finish solution for inserting images (moving and still) into moving footage, with a combination of tools that allow artists to handle everything for complex logo replacements, product packaging alterations and product placement into moving footage, whether it be DV, SD, HD or film. The significant time savings the solution offers is expected to be especially interesting for broadcasters and commercial post-production facilities who are often faced with these challenges.
The technology for monet was developed in collaboration with Cinesite (Europe) Ltd. for use on the HARRY POTTER AND THE PRISONER OF AZKABAN.
"The technology developed with Imagineer Systems is designed to anticipate and resolve issues involved in introducing an image plane into existing live footage," said Aviv Yaron, 2D technical director, and Simon Stanley-Clamp, 2D supervisor, at Cinesite. "It addresses issues such as lens distortion, motion blur and scene lighting conditions and produces consistent and accurate track data."
monet as a solution has taken this technology on and includes tools for 2D plane tracking for motion estimation, manual augmentation of the tracking data without introducing jitter, lens distortion analysis, aspect ratio conversion, scene lighting condition analysis, intensity change analysis for identifying and applying shadows and intensity highlights, per-pixel motion blur application based on motion data, color highlight extraction and compositing, as well as grain handling capability.
"Our aim is to develop the next generation of intelligent, productivity enhancing tools for digital media, said Allan Jaenicke, managing director for Imagineer Systems. With our unique expertise in computer vision and image processing we are able to quickly deliver targeted solutions for post production facilities that solve challenging problems and reduce the time artists need to spend on boring, laborious tasks. monet was created with artists for artists and we are very excited about the benefits of the solution.
"Our approach of working very closely with a single customer in the early stages of development proved to be the right one, with both Cinesite and Imagineer gaining a lot from the relationship. We are now in a position to engage cost effectively with a facility when a specific solution is required later, bringing the benefits of the development to a wider market. We will be replicating this approach with other facilities."
monet will ship as a complete workstation solution that utilizes the Accelera software acceleration card from Aspex Technology, to accelerate the performance of the image processing functions of the application, and offers support for video I/O cards.
monet will be available through authorized partners at the end of Q2 of 2004 with pricing being confirmed nearer the time.
Imagineer (www.imagineersystems.com) is best known for its mokey product, a cutting edge visual effects tool that automates common tasks to increase productivity, ensuring that there is more time for truly creative tasks. Offering motion compensated algorithms for fast, high quality tracking, wire and rig removal, keying, image stabilization, noise reduction, film grain management and lens distortion correction, mokey reduces the time that is spent on these laborious aspects of film and video post-production.
Bill Desowitz, former editor of VFXWorld, is currently the Crafts Editor of IndieWire.
