San Francisco-based RE:Vision Effects has issued a major upgrade for Twixtor Pro, their acclaimed retiming solution, for Discreet's combustion 3, as well as RE:Flex, a warping and morphing solution.
Twixtor is a plugin tool to speed up, slow down or frame rate convert your image sequences with visually stunning results. In order to achieve its unparalleled image quality, Twixtor synthesizes unique new frames by warping and interpolating frames of the original sequence, employing RE:Vision Effects' proprietary tracking technology that calculates motion for each individual pixel.
New with Twixtor Pro 3 in combustion 3, when Twixtor exhibits tracking problems, users can guide Twixtor Pro by simply creating and animating shapes to show Twixtor Pro where objects are actually moving. Interactive feature registration is directed through combustion's drawing and roto tools (splines and polylines), not through a grid of mesh points. As such, there is no new spline interface to learn. One of the best features about Twixtor Pro 3 within combustion 3 is that spline vertices can be tied to combustion's tracker -- something that is not available to Twixtor's users anywhere else.
RE:Flex brings intuitive morphing and warping directly to combustion 3. Superior results are achieved using RE:Vision Effects' proprietary and sophisticated technology. With RE:Flex, warping is directed through the combustion 3 roto tools, not through a grid of mesh points. As such, users can work very intuitively and freely to accomplish warps that can be very difficult or tedious with mesh-based warpers. The integration of RE:Flex with combustion 3 is very tight and seamless; the spline interface for RE:Flex is the one users already know for other combustion tools. As with Twixtor Pro, users of RE:Flex in combustion 3 can tie spline vertices to combustion's tracker.
It should be noted that the morpher in RE:Flex uses the per-pixel image registration found in RE:Vision Effects' acclaimed Twixtor product to automatically align the non-handmatched parts of the image. The automatic alignment feature can greatly improve morphs without having to specify all features by hand.
Twixtor Pro is available for combustion 3 for $595. The regular version of Twixtor is available for $329.99. RE:Flex is bundled with combustion 3 at no extra cost. Twixtor, Twixtor Pro and RE:Flex continue to be available for many other host applications. Demo versions of the software and sample movies process with Twixtor and RE:Flex are available on the RE:Vision Effects Website, www.revisionfx.com.
Bill Desowitz, former editor of VFXWorld, is currently the Crafts Editor of IndieWire.
