The Pixel Farm will demo PFTrack 2.0, its most advanced 3D tracking environment tool at SIGGRAPH 2004 on Aug. 10 at the Los Angeles Convention Center in both the Eyeon and Softimage booths (#1429 and #1547).
Currently available, PFTrack 2.0 will be demonstrated to show a fully integrated Pixel Farm workflow and new optical flow tools. PFTrack 2.0 will include more advanced optical flow functionality, now allowing users to analyze per pixel inter-frame motion, as well as improved Matte editing functionality and a new option to export to Adobe After Effects.
The enhanced tracking and calibration core gives increased speed, in comparison to PFTrack 1.5, extending the range of shots that can be tracked. Improvements have also been made to the image manipulation algorithms speeding up the process of cleaning up footage prior to tracking.
Other optical flow analysis improvements include a new calculation algorithm, proxy resolution flow field support, brush-based flow editing tools, matte and feature-based flow control and export to floating-point and RGB images.
An open API has been designed to allow third parties to access PFTrack's data model. The accompanying release of the optical flow application plug-ins provides the same interface found when applied to plate stitching, retiming, motion blur and layer extraction that is currently found with PFStable and PFBarrel.
Pixel Farm will also demo PFBarn at SIGGRAPH, the recently released image-based modeling system. PFBarn can be used to rebuild 3D environments from a single image source that is still or moving.
London-based The Pixel Farm (www.thepixelfarm.co.uk) was formed in 2002 to provide innovative solutions for digital composting.
Bill Desowitz, former editor of VFXWorld, is currently the Crafts Editor of IndieWire.
