London, UK. September, 2008. Leading visual effects software developer, The Foundry, is delighted to announce the release of Furnace 4 and Keylight for Final Cut Pro 6. These toolsets are The Foundry's first product releases for Final Cut Pro and give artists access to a host of Academy Award © Winning advanced image processing and keying tools.
Thousands of leading digital artists worldwide already take advantage of Furnace and Keylight to enhance workflow and boost productivity in digital visual effects post production.
With Furnace 4, Final Cut Pro 6 artists will - for the first time - be able to access The Foundry's sophisticated motion estimation technology.
Ben Kent, Senior Software Engineer, comments: "With Furnace on Final Cut Pro editors and artists will be able to use advanced motion estimation technology to repair and retime troublesome shots without the hassle, delay and generation loss involved in exporting to a separate compositing package. Improved results and quicker workflow all in one!"
Based on Apple's FxPlug standard,
The Foundry Furnace 4 for Final Cut Pro 6 includes:
DeFlicker is a fully automated plug-in designed to remove luminance flicker in a sequence. It can remove multiple over-lapping phase different flickers, while adapting to cope with motion in the sequence.
DeNoise is a noise and grain removal plug-in that uses advanced motion estimation technology along the direction of motion, thus reducing the noise without introducing any of the artefacts typically associated with noise reduction.
Kronos also uses The Foundry's advanced motion estimation technology to build in-between frames in a sequence. Kronos can be used to speed up (with motion blur) or slow down an image sequence. Artists have the option of supplying foreground mattes, to give retimed objects tight crisp edges and the latest version will detect and account for occluded regions of the image.
ReGrain is an advanced grain management tool, which duplicates grain either from a sample image or stock footage and applies it to a new sequence.
DirtRemoval automatically detects and cleans dirt, dust and hairs from a film scan.
MatchGrade copies the colour look from a reference sequence and applies this to the source image. This technique involves a non-linear transformation of the colour histogram and is useful for balancing and colour matching plates to the master grade.
MotionBlur utilizes advanced image processing to add organic looking motion blur to a sequence. Blur can be added automatically based on the amount of motion in the sequence of the shutter time can e set manually.
The Foundry Keylight, the Academy Award©-winning blue and green screen keyer is easy to use, and highly effective at tackling shots in which it is problematic to pull a clean key - particularly shots featuring hair, reflections and semi-transparent areas. Spill suppression is built-in, meaning that selection of the screen colour is often all that is needed for the user to pull a perfect matte and allow effects elements to be seamlessly seated together and to look genuinely photographed.
"Getting our hardcore tech into the hands of FCP users should be a real boost to what they can do," said Bruno Nicoletti, Chief Technology Officer. “Our engineers have worked brilliantly to build a superb range of effects and bring them to the wider market."
Keylight has an unparalleled pedigree, having been used on scores of feature films including: Speed Racer, King Kong, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, the Harry Potter series, Mission Impossible, Resident Evil, Sleepy Hollow, Chicken Run, The Truman Show, Armageddon and many, many more.
Its ease of use, and ability to tackle difficult footage via an array of built-in tools, has earned Keylight an enviable reputation, and established it as a favourite with visual effects facilities and artists across the world.
Availability and Pricing
About The Foundry
The Foundry is a world-leading innovator of visual effects and image processing technologies that boost productivity in motion picture and video post production. On February 10th 2007, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded a Sci-Tech Award® to The Foundry's development team for the Furnace image processing suite. The company now holds a trio of Academy Award® winning products including the high-end compositing system Nuke, and keying application Keylight.
The Foundry's products support a wide range of host platforms including After Effects, Autodesk® Media and Entertainment Systems, Avid DS, Baselight, Film Master, Nuke, Scratch, Shake and FCP. The company has also driven OpenFX, an open standard for visual effects plug-ins, now broadly adopted by host and plug-in developers such as Autodesk®, Assimilate, FilmLight, Digital Vision, eyeon Software Inc, Grass Valley, Soluciones Graficas por Ordenador (S.G.O.), Photron and others.
Customers include: Digital Domain, The Moving Picture Company, Sony Pictures Imageworks, Warner Bros and Weta Digital Ltd.
The Foundry is headquartered in London, and has offices in Los Angeles.
Labels: Final Cut Pro, Furnace, Keylight, The Foundry
De-noise and de-artifact
This is an excerpt from a book I'm working on called Greensreening & Keying for Low-Budget Indie Filmmakers that will be out next spring. This has not been through the editor yet, so consider it a super early sneak peek! I had actually started this article a couple of months ago for Toolfarm and thought it would be great to put in the book. The book is about keying, obviously, so the article below is geared toward that glorious task. Reducing grain is something that can be used with any footage though, even if you're not keying. I know you knew that already.
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You will get much cleaner keys if you first reduce artifacting, noise and grain in your footage. This step may not be necessary if you have awesome footage, but if you're shooting DV, a quick clean up will help your key and your video look immeasurably cleaner.
Noise can come from bad lighting, JPEG and other compression induced artifacting, film grain, and half-tone patterns. In DV footage, blue will almost always be the noisiest channel and green is the cleanest channel.
There are several methods of reducing noise. A median filter set to a very low value will often do the trick. After Effects ships with a very nice Remove Grain filter, which I highly recommend using. It will soften your footage if you use it to high but in small doses, it can do wonders.
Angie Mistretta, visual effects artist and Apple Shake user, has this advice, which applies to pretty much any host application. "Be sure to degrain your footage via each channel." Sometimes a soft blur on the blue channel will do the trick, but do so very carefully. Most of the time, that won't be enough.
Angie adds, "If you need to Shift Channels, degrain each one and then reunite the channels then that is what you would do. Shake has a node that will allow you to tune for each individual channel."
In After Effects, to degrain per channel, try the Remove Grain plug-in, which ships with After Effects. Apply Effect > Noise & Grain > Remove Grain. Remove Grain does a great job of figuring out the algorithm behind the noise and getting rid of it.
Remove Grain and several third party plug-ins have a Preview Region, which is a white box that shows you a preview of the plug-in. Inside the box, you'll see the effect working and outside the box is just the regular footage. This helps speed up render and screen redraw time. By clicking and dragging the center point of the preview region, you can drag it to the area that you want to use as reference.
Under the Noise Reduction Settings > Mode, you can specify whether you want to reduce noise in all channels (multichannel) or in one channel at a time (single channel). Because noise in video is mainly in the blue channel, the noise reduction can be set higher than the other channels.
When reducing noise is useful to see both the combined RGB and a single channel, so you don't have to switch back and forth between channels. This feature is useful for a number of other purposes too.
To open a second comp viewer:
- At the top of your comp viewer, click on the title of your composition. A pulldown menu will appear. Select 'New Comp Viewer'.
- Drag the new composition tab to the right side of the comp viewer window, until it highlights purple and let go.
- To change the channel being viewed for the new comp viewer, use Show Channel at the bottom of the comp window.
Remove Grain doesn't work well with dirt or dust on video, because it works with the full frame of video. You can adjust the Sampling points under the sampling menu. The sample points should be placed in an area of mid-tonal ranges and with no natural texture, such as over trees, water or a stucco wall. It will calculate the noise based on the texture and will not help your cause. Mark Christiansen's book, After Effects CS3 Professional Studio Techniques, talks about the Remove Grain plug-in used to give an aging actress a tighter face, so occasionally using this plug-in for a digital Botox on a skin texture can be very useful! By default, the sampling points are taken from the first frame. You can adjust and keyframe the source frame also.
You will also want to adjust the Noise Reduction Settings and the Fine Tuning in Remove Grain. Be careful not to be too heavy handed with the effect because it will flatten your textures. Before rendering, switch the Viewing Mode to Final Output.
When you're removing noise specifically for keying, many keyers have built-in noise suppression. The Foundry Keylight has a Screen Pre-blur and Screen Softness Options.
Sometimes Remove Grain just isn't enough and you need a third party solution for reducing noise. Check out Reduce Noise, Grain and Artifacting in our Plug-in Finder for a long list of plug-ins for several host applications. There really are a lot of great choices. Here are a couple that I use.
- RE:Vision Effects DE:Noise - Peter Litwinowicz, Co-Founder of RE:Vision Effects said, "Noise in the green screen areas can hamper your ability to pull a great key. DE:Noise is a great plug-in to help pull a better key, because it helps eliminates noise while keeping sharp the details and edges of your objects of interest." De:Noise works with After Effects, Premiere Pro, Boris Red, Combustion, Final Cut Pro, Motion and Fusion.
Digital Film Tools Composite Suite - Deartifact is handy for cleaning up artifacts caused by DV and HD video footage. In fact, it is useful for cleaning up images that have aliased or jaggy edges. - Boris FX, Inc. Continuum Complete has two noise removal filters, BCC DeGrain Filter and DeNoise Filter. BCC DeGrain removes grain-sized noise from an image by analyzing a sample of the grain, then filtering out image noise that has similar frequency (spectrum) and amplitude. The BCC DeNoise filter removes unwanted pixel noise from an image. DeNoise is especially useful when working with archival materials, as it lets you correct dark areas that show artifacts from film emulsion or video compression. You may also want to use the BCC DeNoise filter when resizing 4:3 images to 16:9 aspect ratio. BCC is available for pretty much every host app you might use.
- Red Giant Software Key Correct Pro is made specifically for keying and quickly clean up noisy images and mattes. Use the simple Denoiser and Alpha Cleaner tools to fix low-light noise problems in poorly lit footage
Labels: DE:Noise, Keylight, Plug-in Finder, Re:Vision Effects, The Foundry
No new one for the Tinderbox plug-ins for AE. What do you think? I like the strong graphical look of them. This makes me realize how badly I need to redesign some icons in our store. One of these days...
Did you know that we sell plug-ins for Autodesk (Discreet) Advanced Systems (Flame, Inferno, Smoke, etc.) as well as Combustion, OFX and loads of other hosts? Check out our listing of Host Apps that we sell plug-ins for. Did I just end that sentence in a preposition? Sorry, Mr. Cochrane.
Labels: Anvil, Furnace, Keylight, Nuke, The Foundry, Tinder
