SynthEyes™ 2008 Feature Summary
For information about camera tracking and matchmoving: what it is, how to use it; see the tutorials, our special introduction (FAQ) page and the more advanced Good Question! page.
Types of Shots
Image Preprocessor
Object Separation
Tracking
Solving
Coordinate System Setup
Graph Editor
Perspective Window
Imports and Exports
Scripting
Types of Shots
- Camera tracking
- Moving-object tracking
- Stereoscopic tracking
- Fully automatic match-moving for straightforward shots
- Rapid supervised tracking for difficult tracks.
- Fixed (known or unknown) or zooming lens field of view
- Manual or automated lens distortion calculation
- Nodal solving: compute camera pan/tilt and tracker directions when camera was mounted on a tripod (ie computes a ~2½-D track because 3-D is not possible)
- Mixed nodal and translating shots
- Nodal "all-far" stereoscopic shots
- Multiple cameras and moving objects with simultaneous solving, including mixes such as tripod-mounted camera(2½-D) with moving object(3-D), or a video shot plus digital camera reference stills
- Reference-mesh-based tracking
- Motion Capture — for faces or whole bodies, using multiple cameras
Image Preprocessor
- Flexible image preprocessing engine for easier tracking and RAM storage of large film-resolution shots
- Image stabilization engine, directable by user, integrated with 3-D tracking.
- Image format re-sampling and aspect changes.
- Traditional hue/saturation and animated level adjustments
- 3D Color LUTs: .3dl, .cube, .csp
- R/G/B channel selection and inversion
- Blur to remove film grain and compression artifacts
- High-pass filter for varying lighting, such as strobes and explosions
- Lens distortion removal—animate for zooms with distortion
- Quadratic, cubic, or table-based preset distortion models.
- Optic axis re-centering
- DeRez to maximize RAM cache
- Mirror imaging for mirror-based stereo rigs
- Maintain multiple setups to focus on different regions or objects.
- Save processed image sequence to disk (see exports below)
- Reapply lens distortion and cropping for total lens distortion workflow
- Selectable resampling filter
- 8-bit, 16-bit fixed, 32-bit float processing available, storage in those formats plus 16-bit float
- Use for geometric conform of stereo shots
- Animated Region of Interest to reduce RAM on object-tracking shots
- Multi-threaded image fetch for exceptional performance
Object Separation
- Automatically select trackers only within a green-screen region
- Set up regions for each moving object or garbage mattes for actors, for example
- Keyframe-animated splines to define regions
- Quick square and circle spline setup
- Import spline control points from tracker paths for rapid setup
- Animated enables for splines
- Use a rotoscoped alpha-channel
- Can store roto-spline and green-screen mattes to disk
Tracking
- High-performance multi-threaded autotrack
- Stereoscopic autotrack with automated correspondence
- Mix supervised and automatic tracking on the same shot
- Match, white spot, black spot, symmetric trackers
- Bidirectional tracking
- Automatic periodic keying
- Smoothing at keys
- Tracker cleanup wizard to locate problematic trackers
- Real-time error calculation and position calculation after initial 3-D solve
- Special tracking modes for hand-held shots
- Option to re-track automatic trackers with supervised algorithms to increase accuracy
Solving
- Object and tracker weighting
- Zero-weighted trackers: 3-D positions without affecting the camera path, and can be used for instant position calculation during tracking
- Skip-frame track for auto-tracking and solving
- Tracker monitoring during solving for increased robustness
- Refine previously-computed solutions, for rapid tweaking
- Hard and soft camera path and field of view locking
- Flexible camera/camera locking controls for stereo—work with varying IOD and vergence
- Rapidly add additional trackers with specified accuracies after initial solve
- Coalesce co-located trackers: trackers on the same image feature, but typically during different sections of the shot
- Post-solve camera path filtering
- Light solver to determine light position or direction from ray or planar geometry, or from a reflection from a mesh
- Novel 3-D curve tracking and solving system to find 3-D curve shape even if the curve has no point features
Coordinate System Setup
- Quick setup wizard - click 3 trackers, then (optionally) automatically realign
- Line-based alignment for nodal-tripod and lock-off shots.
- Flexible coordinate system alignment controls for complex situations
- New coordinate placement methods based on camera positioning
- Easily select the desired solution when several are possible
- Move entire scene and paths manually if desired
- Exact constraints for survey data, including infrequent GPS waypoints
- Coordinate system setup before or after solving
Graph Editor
- Graph and track editing for monitoring and cleanup
- Works on trackers, cameras, image preprocessor
- Advanced multi-curve display
- Squished-track view and other features to learn about the entire shot at a glance
- Quick glitch fixing
- Bake animation to keys, or decimate keys to spline
- Embed in viewport, or floating; any number at once
Perspective Window
- Navigate the 3-D scene independent of the solved camera
- Mesh-building commands to turn a collection of trackers into an exportable 3-D mesh to build shadow catchers and proxy geometry
- Place seed points on imported meshes to aid tough object tracks
- Anaglyph stereo display in perspective view (including for 3-D viewing of non-stereo shots)
- Create preview movies for real-time playback in the Quicktime Player, including antialiasing
- Depth map outputs
- Front-projection onto meshes
- Shadow-casting onto the ground plane or constructed mesh(es)
- Object-manipulation handles
Imports and Exports
- Imports: AVI*, BMP, Cineon, DPX, DV*, JPEG, MPEG, QuickTime™ (Apple) MOV*, OpenEXR, PNG, SGI RGB, Targa, TIFF.
- Exports: BMP, Cineon, DPX, JPEG, MOV*, OpenEXR, PNG, SGI, Targa, TIFF.
- Any practical resolution, image or pixel aspect ratio (no resolution limits), ie SD, HD, 2K, 3K, 4K, 6K, ...
- 16 bits/channel and floating-point for selected image types
- Included exporters for MAXscript (3ds max, 3D Studio VIZ); Maya scene file; Softimage dotXSI; Lightwave; Maxon C4D (via .LWS); Modo; Bentley Microstation; Houdini; Blender; Carrara; Electric Image; Hash Animation: Master; Poser, Realsoft 3D; trueSpace; Vue 5 & 6 Infinite; Discreet Flame/Inferno/Smoke2008(3-D); Combustion(3-D); Combustion/Flame/Inferno 2-D ASCII tracker file; After Effects(2- & 3-D); Shake (2- & 3-D); Apple Motion(2- & 3-D); Nuke; FLAIR motion control cameras; Fusion (2-D); Fusion 5 (3-D); toxik; Mistika; Particle Illusion
- Flexible generic ASCII text importers and exporters for tracker 2-D paths and 3-D positions, and camera/object paths
- Sample exports available. Features can vary from exporter to exporter
- If you are keen on a certain export and are willing to help, see what is needed to develop new exporters
*: AVI/MOV capabilities slow, limited, or unavailable on 64-bit Win&Mac systems (operating system limited).
Scripting
- SIZZLE™ scripting language, so you can modify existing exporters, or add new importers, tools, or exporters
- Extensive script access to the scene, including image preparation system
- Detachable free-floating script user-interfaces
- Start-up and Post-solve script
- XML read/manipulate/write
- HTTP Get/Post
- Available 'global' variables from one script to another
- 'System' call to interact with other applications and shell scripts
Workflow and User Interface
- Stand-alone application for Mac or PC. See system recommendations. 64-bit versions available, or 32-bit versions run under 64-bit operating systems.
- Extensive multi-threaded/multi-core optimization throughout the application; tuned for efficient operation on 8-core machines.
- Multi-shot batch processing for unattended track/solve or sequence writing
- Merge tracked files
- Scrubbable and real-time RAM Buffer Playback with 3-D CG object overlays
- File-information dialog for comments and image and mesh version tracking
- Handy free-floating toolbars and manager
- Configurable keyboard mapping
- Configurable viewport layouts
- Configurable shot presets
- Configurable coordinate system definition (Max, Maya, Lightwave)
- Configurable color scheme, including dark studio and light office presets (samples).
- Floatable camera view and control panel
- Interface can be leaned down as a RAM player, including user-configurable safe area display
- Customer care center featuring automatic downloads of new versions, messaging system, and feature suggestion system
