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Imagineer Systems announced the release of monet, its new product for broadcast, film and video post-production markets. monet is uniquely offers a start-to-finish solution for replacing elements in film and video. monet offers precision, lens distortion aware, 2D motion tracking with tools that allow accurate adjustments of the track to be made. It allows properties of the source material, such as lens distortion, shadows, highlights and grain/noise easily to be applied to the new element.

Kelseus will launch Antics Pre-Viz, its own previs product that uses intelligent realtime 3D animation technology, at SIGGRAPH 2004, Aug. 10-12, at the Los Angeles Convention Center in booth #1355.

The Orphanage Inc., whose recent visual effects efforts include THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW and HELLBOY, announced the release eLin, the a suite of plug-ins and scripts for Adobe After Effects 6.5 that allow compositors to work in the expanded photographic color space of film. eLin is free of charge for non-commercial use.

Massive, developer of the premiere 3D animation system for artificial intelligence-driven, crowd-related visual effects is streamlining the generation of arena spectators, crowds moving en masse and large-scale digital armies with breakthrough Ready-to-Run Agents. These pre-built agents can be easily dropped into shots to create 3D character-based crowd scenarios allowing animators to significantly speed up their workflow. The initial agents, debuting Aug.

In anticipation of SIGGRAPH next week, VFXWORLD focuses on emerging technologies throughout August. We begin on Friday with Mary Ann Skweres' sneak peek at Paul Debevec's latest cutting-edge virtual journey, THE PARTHENON, a short film premiering in SIGGRAPH's Electronic Theater. Using the best archaeological sources available, Debevec digitally reconstructs the famed temple and photorealistically recreates many of the sculptures, revealing a host of new 3D visualization advancements.

e-on software, the leading publisher in natural 3D scenery software, announces the forthcoming release of the fifth iteration of Vue/Esprit, its award winning scenery rendering and animation software for casual and advanced digital artists. Vue 5 Esprit will add a long list of superior realism features for the creation of ultra natural 3D graphics.