(21 April 2006) Imagineer Systems, the UK-based developer of innovative visual effects tools, announced today how Hollywood-based facility, CIS Hollywood, purchased monet late 2005 and since has used it on numerous blockbuster feature films.
At the time of purchase, Visual Effects Supervisors Bryan Hirota and Patrick Kavanaugh were in the middle of overseeing an aerial shot for Eight Below that needed the path of the dogs removed in the snow in front of them so it looked like untouched snow rather than the path that had been worn from take after take.
"Sometimes these simple removal shots turn out to be a bit more epic than anyone thinks they will be. The camera pan and push in was too complicated to paint it out. The detail was too little and without enough contrast for conventional tracking. We tried replacing the patch with a 3D texture tracked in Boujou. That was close but even that wasn't dead on. So we used monet to align the difference between the Boujou tracked element and the plate. Without monet this shot would have taken untold days and already had absorbed at least a week. With monet the shot was fixed within a couple of hours. After that we started using it on shot after shot. We got through two dozen shots we were originally awarded in less than half the time we estimated," says Visual Effects Supervisor Patrick Kavanaugh.
"Before we knew it we were awarded more shots. What was a fairly small show kept growing as we finalised shot after shot in record time. Eventually this small project grew to over 150 shots. I am fully confident that the reason they kept awarding us shots was the speed we were able to do them in. Without monet, Eight Below would have been a very short run.
Since then CIS Hollywood have used it extensively in Poseidon, X-Men 3: The Last Stand, and Pirates of the Caribbean II: Dead Man's Chest.
"In Poseidon, monet was used to track in set extensions. In both X-Men 3: The Last Stand and Pirates of the Caribbean II: Dead Man's Chest monet was used for eye replacement. For both of these movies we did eye replacements in the proceeding movies but with monet the eye replacement time was at least 150% faster. In X-Men 3: The Last Stand monet was used to track in Mystique's eyes. For Pirates of the Caribbean II: Dead Man's Chest monet was used to replace the character Ragetti's eye with a wooden eyeball."
Allan Jaenicke, CEO of Imagineer Systems comments on the new developments: "CIS Hollywood is an excellent example of how a progressive facility can use technology to stay competitive. Where used, monet is proving to be a very valuable tool that wins business for our costumers."
About Imagineer Systems
Imagineer Systems Ltd focuses on research, development and marketing of productivity enhancing visual effects solutions for film, video and broadcast post production. The company was founded in 2000 and is based in Guildford, United Kingdom.
About monet
monet™ is a unique tracking and compositing toolset for commercial, film and corporate video post production work. Based on Imagineer's unique 2.5D planar tracking and shadow/highlight extraction technology it offers a cost effective, standalone solution for performing virtual product placement and complements traditional post production pipelines by delivering the highest quality 2D tracking data and graphical elements for finishing in other compositing and editing systems.
About mokey
mokey™ offers an essential toolset for removing wires, rigs, logos, scratches, hairs and other undesired elements in commercial, film and corporate video post production work. Based on Imagineer's unique 2.5D planar tracking and background reconstruction technology it seamlessly removes elements and provides an excellent alternative to the painstaking, manual process of painting or cloning.
About mofex
mofex™ is a unique set of plug-ins for Apple's Shake compositing software for manipulating elements being composited, supporting application of lens distortion, calculation and application of shadows and highlights, application of tracking marker filters, adaptive anti-aliasing filtering, warping, temporal median filtering and more.
About motor
motor™ is a unique rotoscoping tool for commercial, film and corporate video post production work. Packaged as a standalone tool based on Imagineer's unique 2.5D planar tracking and spline technology, it offers a way of producing very high quality mattes 3-4 times faster than with traditional tools.
About moxel
moxel™ elegantly handles 'standards and practice' work, such as removing undesired branding and obscuring identities by using image recognition techniques to reduce the amount of time spent on these tedious and laborious tasks. Designed for speed and ease of use, moxel is the ideal solution for ensuring that content meets broadcast standards.
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