RE:Vision Effects has released a major update to its Shake version of Twixtor, the popular retiming solution, and a minor update to ReelSmart Motion Blur (RSMB), which adds and removes motion blur based on per-pixel calculated motion.
Nick Brooks, Academy Award and Emmy Award winner for visual effects, says, "Twixtor 4.5 represents a new touchstone in retiming. The difference in accuracy means that retiming artifacts are either drastically reduced or disappear on the hardest to retime footage. "
Twixtor 4.5 introduces a complete rewrite of its tracking. Twixtor is much more accurate, tracks objects farther, and exhibits fewer artifacts when there are objects crossing in the scene. This means less tearing and stretching of objects as they cross or go out of the frame. Twixtor now includes a smart blending option for pans and zooms to prevent inappropriate streaking or weird artifacts at frame borders. Twixtor also adds an option to automatically enhance dark imagery or imagery with poorly defined edges. With the new features, many pieces of footage that were previously difficult to track become well behaved.
New in Twixtor 4.5 for Shake:
* Completely rewritten motion estimation engine. Twixtor is much more accurate, tracks objects farther, and exhibits fewer artifacts when there are objects crossing in the scene.* Floating point support.* Contains an option to remove motion blur when slowing footage.* New warp modes Forward Warping and Inverse Warping with Smart Blending (as seen in RE:Flex) to avoid artifacts at the edges of the frame.* Motion Vectors Import and Export modes.* New "First Frame" setting for sequences that don't start at frame one.
New in RSMB 3.2 Shake:* Completely rewritten motion estimation engine.* New First Frame setting for sequence that don't start at frame one.
Twixtor for Shake, full license, is priced at $795. Note that a full license for a machine also includes a render license for that machine. Render-only license is priced at $198.75. Render-only licenses will only render scripts written by Shake on a machine with a valid full licensed version of Twixtor. Upgrade from Twixtor 3 to Twixtor 4, full-version: $199. Upgrades of Twixtor 3 to Twixtor 4 render-only licenses are free.
RSMB 3.2 upgrade is free to previous licensees of RSMB version 3. Pricing for upgrades from pre-3 versions of RSMB is available on the RE:Vision Effects website. RSMB 3.2 full license is priced at $189.95. A full license for a machine will run in both interactive and render versions of Shake. Render-only licenses are priced at $53.99. Render-only licenses will only render scripts written by a valid full licensed version of RSMB.
Twixtor Pro 4.5 for Shake is available for Mac OS X and Linux, and for Shake versions 3.01 and 3.50. Twixtor 4.5 will be available for Shake 4.0 as soon as Shake 4.0 ships. There is no Windows support for Twixtor 4.5.
RSMB Pro 3.2 for Shake is available for Shake 3.01 and Shake 3.5 for Mac OS X and Linux, and for Shake version 2.51 for Windows.
Twixtor and ReelSmart Motion Blur continue to be available for Apple Final Cut Pro, Avid Editing Systems, Autodesk Combustion, Discreet Systems, Eyeon Digital Fusion, Adobe After Effects, Premiere Pro, Quantel systems and others.
San Francisco-based RE:Vision Effects (www.revisionfx.com) specializes in technologies involving animation, tracking motion, non-photorealistic rendering and image processing.
Bill Desowitz, former editor of VFXWorld, is currently the Crafts Editor of IndieWire.
