Quotes from SynthEyes™ Customers!

James Cunningham, Digipost, "SynthEyes played an incredibly pivotal role and worked really well for us. Thanks for making such good software... The tutorials were very useful. Great to watch you doing tracks in real time and see exactly what steps you took, what modes you tracked with etc." Read more information on Digipost's project, Cascade.

FORUM KEYWORD:  tracking

Sander de Regt, ShadowMaker SdR, "Thank you Russ, for adding that little green update light in Syntheyes. On Friday I received three shots scanned at 2K resolution - about 300 frames each, that needed some very heavy duty stabilizing. Just for the heck of it I fired up SynthEyes, to get me some automated trackers to help me in getting a 'traditional' 2D solution - meaning lots of handwork and guessing etc. Then I noticed the green update light. 2007½ was available. I downloaded it - read about the new stabilizing - did the dance of joy - fiddled a bit with the settings to get 'adequate' results (the shaking was so severe that completely removing it, would result in 'in place motion blur') And presto - less than 3 minutes to load, track and solve a shot (that's crazy in itself) and less than 10 minutes to choose the stabilize settings and render them out. All in all with me drying the keyboard from the drooling I'd been doing, less than 30 minutes start to finish per shot!"

Mark Noland, Tigar Hare, "We are working on a bunch of HD cut-scenes for an EA title to be released soon. Initially they tried PF Track. That did not work so they moved on to try Boujou, that had more success but still was not creating good 3d solves. I came on board to help out with tracking and after 1 1/2 weeks of trying to solve shots with Boujou I suggested that we try SynthEyes. The demo version was able to get a solve on a shot that was unsolvable to Boujou. So here we are purchasing a copy.

I seriously think that you should consider some kind of more expensive offering, perhaps in the $5K range... When studios see Boujou 4 for $10K and SynthEyes for $449.00 [for the 64-bit version, $399 for 32-bit—Ed.] they assume that SynthEyes is amateur desktop software. Please don't get me wrong I LOVE that it's under $500. It would be affordable to put at every 3D artist's seat at that price. But perhaps you could add special EXR, Cineon & LUT tools for film and make people that have to have them pay extra. I don't know what the answer is except that SynthEyes is killer. Thanks for making it."

Scott Krehbiel, "I exclusively used SynthEyes while working on Pan's Labyrinth, and the CG Supervisor was rather continually amazed at how I was simply blowing their deadlines clean out of the water. Shots which they'd expected to take two weeks were being done in two to three days. I also used the zero-weight points to model many surfaces which needed to be very accurate so that a 3d stick bug could walk across them. Kudos to SynthEyes!"

Sam Cole, Fuel, "2D at FUEL used SynthEyes for a few especially gnarly shots during Charlotte's Web. A lot of the time compositors don't need an entire 3d solve, they just want to recover track points that spend some time occluded. For $399 and a couple of hours invested in the docs, our compositors can solve a camera for almost any shot, in a very short amount of time. SynthEyes is smoking fast, easy to understand and the support is phenomenal. Thanks Russ!"

An entertaining account from an educator using SynthEyes to out-track his buddy using a so-called competitive package, despite giving him plenty of breaks.

Michael Lori, Asylum FX, "We had a very tight deadline on King Kong, and the raw speed of SynthEyes allowed me to finish a hefty amount of tracking in a very short time. I was able to track 30 shots perfectly - without auto-tracking - in about 24 hours. Long frame ranges, different bit depth plates, exporting to multiple compositing/3D packages, changes in shot duration (head and tail) after the initial track was done---SynthEyes handled it all without missing a beat. Thank you, Andersson Technologies LLC, for giving me my nights and weekends away from my desk!"

Lee Gabel, freelancer, “I am enjoying the 2006½ edition! The zero weighted trackers, joining trackers and roto keying options are great! Thank you!”

Jim Agnew, The Picture House, "We love Syntheyes! I used the package sucessfully on a commercial for the Police Service of Northern Ireland recently. It was the first matchmoving project posted in Northern Ireland and all concerned were very happy."

Michael Wolf of Gadget, on Bye Bye Blackbird, from 3D World Magazine, Issue 71, "We used SynthEyes for the matchmoving. It behaved remarkably well and once you get used to it, you can work extremely quickly with it. It's a well designed tool. I've used it since on a couple of other projects and I'm very pleased with the results."

Don Lee, Pixel Playground, Inc., "We had great success in using SynthEyes on 35 of our shots for "The Aviator". The sequence we used it in was the night flying with Howard and Kate. They were shot on a green screen set with no tracking markers, and a camera moving all over the place. After viewing the footage that was shot for the background I realized we had to come up with solution to a big problem. The footage was limited to only front and side angles, not allowing for any perspective change. So using Lightwave we created a CG model of the L.A. area to fly over. Then used a combination of frame grabs from the footage that was projected on to the model. We augmented the frame grabs with lights generated in Lightwave, and thanks to SynthEyes we were able to get cameras solves that tracked the green screen camera. SynthEyes was extremely valuable in the success of these shots! Thanks for a wonderful product, and enjoy the movie."

Matt Merkovich, while at Asylum FX, "I used SynthEyes to track dozens upon dozens of shots for Master and Commander and it never once failed to produce perfect results. In fact, shortly after beginning to use an early beta version of it, I dropped all other tracking software and ended up doing all my tracking in Master and Commander using those early beta versions of SynthEyes. And it has only gotten better since then! SynthEyes is the software to use if your tracking needs range from simple to the very most complex of shots. It easily is the best camera match mover and object tracker out there."

Mark Spevick, Peerless Camera Co., "I am presently leading 40 object tracking shots (horse heads for muzzle replacement) and am absolutely blown away by the speed and ease of analysis that SynthEyes provides...I was the lead matchmover on Troy and I used a couple of popular matchmoving softwares which I really liked, but SynthEyes sits wack bang in the middle of the two main ones and blows them out the water for ease of use and speed.....they are, individually, not as complete as SynthEyes or as fast."

James Coulter, Sr. TD at Digital Dimension, “SynthEyes’ speed and accuracy are incredible, and with supervised tracking it can solve difficult shots that defy other tracking software. To see SynthEyes' rock-solid results, check out the vampire ashing shots we did for Blade: Trinity.”

Jeff Apczynski, "A fellow student was trying to track a shot with Boujou and after three weeks and many attempts he still could not get a “locked down” camera track. In desperation, I was asked to see if SynthEyes could help. I fired up SynthEyes, loaded the plates, and ran the autotracker, after about 1 minute SynthEyes exported a perfect camera track! Everyone at the school, including the school’s Director, is impressed with SynthEyes' speed and its user-friendly GUI. Well Done!"

Dave Tracey, freelancer, Australia, "Just finished a job using SynthEyes and I can't get over how good this program is. About twenty-six shots were matchmoved and at no point in discussions with clients did anyone breathe a word about them. The point is they were so good that even the client 'forgot' we were matchmoving the live action. • Some of the moves were quite difficult too; moving actors shot close up against green, which left very little of the frame for matchmoving. But SynthEyes nailed each one. • And even for just straight tracking, this one is the bomb. The workflow on tracking, even supervised or manual tracking, is just a wonder. I use Digital Fusion and it's a great program, but SynthEyes tracking just blows it away. Russ recently wrote an exporter for single tracks because I just couldn't go back to the old way. • I realise I'm giving it a big rave, but this program costs just $US349 [Ed.: at that time, currently $399] yet it performed at ten times its price point. Amazing!"

António Carreira, Street Dog Studio, "I bought SynthEyes a couple of weeks ago and only now I had the chance to use it. I felt like I had to thank you guys for this wonderful piece of software! I don't think I could ever achieve such great results with boujou or matchmover, or actually something that required me to read the manual. I'm using SynthEyes at the lowest level you can imagine: fully automatic, lock 2 or 3 points and let it rip! And it stills produces amazing results! I will read the documentation sooner or later, but this is an amazing tool for people in a rush (most 3D people I guess...).By the way, I'm using it with Cinema 4D 8.5, exporting through .lws, and it's perfect! Thanks again and keep it up!"

Andre Hitsoy, BUG, Norway. "I spent whole yesterday in Boujou [demo] tracking a difficult bluescreen shot. Then I dl'd your demo (which I found through a link at the Community forum at Newtek, loaded up the shot, chose PAL and frame range, pressed ok, chose gentle motion, pressed Full Automatic, and BAM!! One minute, and I could export a LightWave scene in which the main character was glued to the cg floor."

George Port, PRP VFX, "It's the best match mover on the planet."

Joe Ken, Asylum Visual Effects: "I'm really impressed with the program. The more I use it, the quicker I get. I'm amazed at the shots that you can track with SynthEyes that would be impossible with boujou or other trackers, and how straight forward it is."

Brandon Davis, freelance VFX artist, particlefx.com, "...I looked carefully at the shot and it turns out it's a tripod camera move with a zoom. So once I set that it solved, no problem! This is a big deal for me here because the other guys were wasting days with Boujou trying to track that shot. Just to be sure I started over and retracked it (supervised) with about 12 points and re-solved it in about 10 minutes."

Steffen Hacker, Hackermovies.com: "Since we only work with Matchmover 2.5 licenses at the Filmakademie I nearly gave up a shot which was shot with a very wide12mm-optic on a XL1s with P+S-Mini35-Adapter, because it always produced poor results and I thought because of distortion or other things it might not be trackable. But your amazing software proved me wrong! With autotrack SynthEyes produced a better track after 2 mins than Matchmover ever did"

[For a "different" look at SynthEyes, we have posted the following letter from a user.]