TECH & TOOLS
KEY NEW FEATURES IN COMPOSITING TOOLS TO HELP EXPEDITE YOUR WORK By IAN FAILES
If you’re a visual effects compositor, you may tend to stick mostly to just one tool for your 2D work. So you may not be overly familiar with the latest features in some other compositing software that can help improve your productivity. By identifying some key new features of the most popular compositing tools out there right now, you can find out about a useful feature or workflow in a tool you don’t currently use. Here, we talk to representatives from Foundry (Nuke), Autodesk (Flame), Blackmagic Design (Fusion) and Adobe (After Effects), who each highlight a new or prominent feature in their respective compositing toolset. Some of these features involve machine learning or AI techniques, while others deal with specific workflow speed-ups. NUKE’S CUSTOM MACHINE LEARNING NETWORKS WITH COPYCAT
TOP: Nuke’s CopyCat node, which relies on machine learning techniques, in action for carrying out a paint fix. (Image courtesy of Foundry) OPPOSITE TOP TO BOTTOM: CopyCat copies sequence-specific effects such as garbage matting, beauty repairs or deblurring. (Image courtesy of Foundry) Camera Analysis is a match move 3D camera solver in Flame that aids in adding objects into a scene, carrying out cleanup work with projections, or crafting set extensions. (Image courtesy of Autodesk) Face match moving using the Flame Camera Analysis solver. (Image courtesy of Autodesk)
A number of compositing tools have adopted machine learning and AI techniques to enhance image processing. In particular, Foundry’s Nuke, in conjunction with CopyCat, allows you to orchestrate bespoke training for machine learning networks specific to individual compositing problems. “The easiest way to think about it is with, for example, a cleanup shot,” outlines Juan Salazar, Nuke Product Manager at Foundry. “Say you have a really difficult object removal to do on a 100-frame shot. You could do that cleanup on four or five carefully chosen frames, and pass those into CopyCat along with the original, un-cleaned-up versions of those frames. With that data and a bit of training time, CopyCat can train a machine learning algorithm whose only job is to remove that specific object from that specific shot. “Once you run that network on your shot,” continues Salazar,
68 • VFXVOICE.COM SPRING 2022
PG 68-71 COMP TOOLS.indd 68
2/28/22 1:50 PM
