Hasta La Motion!

Silhouette, already the digital post-production industry’s leading roto and paint solution, aims to be the last word in cutting mattes combining four powerful technologies in version 4.

SilhouetteFX, LLC is pleased to announce the immediate availability of version 4 of Silhouette, the digital post-production industry’s leading stereo paint and roto solution. Incorporating many improvements and new features including a vastly improved planar tracker, version 4’s aim is to provide a complete matting solution from fast automatic methods to fine-scale hardcore manual means.

New in version 4 is Power Matte, an automatic means of pulling mattes for complex organic objects without the aid of specialized backdrops. To use Power Matte, loose rough shapes are drawn on the foreground and background objects. Power Matte cuts the matte automatically based on these shapes. Silhouette’s tracking tools can even be used to animate the rough shapes, further easing the task of cuttings masks for long sequences. The unpublished research and technology behind Power Matte incorporates the latest developments relating to inner-outer shape masking algorithms.

Silhouette 4 offers four distinct matte extraction modalities. Mattes may be cut with Silhouette’s industry leading rotoscoping tool set, shape driven (hence tracker-enabled) raster paint tools, chroma-based keying tools and now with Power Matte. Given that all of these tools are stereoscopic 3D enabled, Silhouette v4 is a powerful tool to meet the challenges of today’s most advanced filmmakers.

Version 4 features a completely rewritten planar tracker. The company believes its new planar tracker compares well with similar technologies offered by competitors. Taken in combination with Silhouette’s undisputed lead in other areas, the new planar tracker reduces the range of cases where any other product need be employed.

Also in Silhouette v4 is a comprehensive scripting model and command-line interface (CLI). The CLI allows facilities with headless render-farms to more effectively use Silhouette. The scripting model exposes a great deal of Silhouette’s internals for Python-based scripting enabling facilities to build infrastructure and capabilities customized to their unique needs.

A number of new features have been added to Silhouette’s paint arsenal. Version 4 adds clone source grading allowing clone sources to be dynamically color matched to their destinations. A new horizontal or vertical split display mode aids in setting the clone source grading. Pairs of clone sources can now be defined and drawn from simultaneously. Each clone source has its own independent grading and transformation capability.

Version 4 onward for MacOS is now available as a 64 bit version to take full advantage of RAM for longer sequences.

Other enhancements and fixes are too numerous to list in this format.

Silhouette v4 has a price of $995 per node locked license. A floating license server and 3 licenses is available for $3,495. Additional floating licenses are available for $1,295. Version 3 licenses may be upgraded for $295. The company’s web site is located at: http://www.silhouettefx.com.