Why buy PFTrack 5.0?
“We had a very young team on Cloverfield, and for a lot of the trackers it was their first show. We had every Matchmover’s nightmarew, we had huge blur we also had to deal with huge zooms, a very shaky handicam and dark plates. In addition the shots were very long.PFTrack helped a lot here, with it’s great interface and easy set up of shots, within a couple of hours all of them had the hang of using it.” Sam Schwier, Matchmove Supervisor, Double Negative
Not only does PFTrack provide you with the best and most cost effective professional Match Moving system on the market but it also allows you to generate Optical flow data, Z depth data and geometry for use in your entire visual effects pipeline. Owning PFTrack is like having your very own visual effects Swiss Army Knife, but one in which you choose exactly which tools you need. Autodesk FBX and Apple Motion offers PFTrack streamlined interoperability between many applications, including Flame, Flint and Smoke. The ability to work with 3D Stereoscopic footage and produce true camera solves further extends PFTrack's pipeline options.
The unique geometry tracking system in PFTrack allows 3D geometry to be imported into PFTrack and then matched to sequences, making this an ideal tool for head and facial replacement meaning artists can now be confident that animated CG, when rendered and composited, will exactly match the live action. Complex Geometry can be imported and used to solve cameras in addition to the use of automatic or user placed features. This is perfect for problematic shots or for tracking set extention models into footge. Using motion groups it is a simple task to extract both camera and object motion. Any or all motions can be exported along with animated geometry if required. Version 5.0 includes Geometry Tracking vertex weighting this allows you to paint the influence each vertex point has on the final tracking. A simple paint tool allows you to quickly paint onto the imported 3D geometry.
True Stereoscopic support
is another first in tracking software. Working with both left and right eye images to produce a truly independent camera motion. Each eye is solved as a distinct motion path and presented as a stereo camera rather than just calculating an image plane offset. For the first time film makers working in 3D have a tool that enables them to maintain a true stereo VFX pipeline.Camera Motion Key frames
can be automatically or manually placed to break a shot down into distinct motion groups and each motion can then be assigned one of 6 camera motions. The new solver can then produce a single export that combines these motions. This means you no longer have to break a shot into segments and solve each one and conbine then back together in a 3D system.PFTrack 5.0 includes support for Reference Frames. High resolution stills can be imported and used to define common points in space to improve solves with nodal pans.
PFTrack 5.0 includes a Focal Length Estimation tool to greatly aid solving. This provides the user with a graphic means to calculate focal length, often improving results.
Fully editable F-Curves within PFTrack make cleaning up tracking data extremely easy and accurate. You can quickly view and edit each individual property of the camera within a graph editor in the timeline – curves can be represented by both linear and Bezier splinesand simply smoothed or edited using the tools provided. Once edited, the new camera solver quickly produces a new camera without the need to totally re solve every parameter in the sequence. Camera and Tracking errors can also have a graphic representation and can quickly be adjusted with instant feedback.
The ability to save tracking data even if a solve fails is a boon for those who need to track long shots. PFTrack 5.0 also allows you to add frames to an already solved shot and extend the tracking data without the need to start all over again. Working with long shots is also helped with fit to Ram playback, this allow you to compress footage to fit into memory without the need to reduce the image quality for tracking.
The addition of, fully integrated motion capture tools provide everything you need to do motion capture tests. The ability to solve for several cameras in a single scene provides a means to produce 3D point cloud data by matching points in each camera. A day or two saved in a Motion Capture Studio by pre planning shots pays for PFTrack in one go!
The, fully integrated image based modelling capabilities allow users to quickly build up 3D environments by using the background image as a guide. The Auto-Mesh tool allows selected solved auto and user feaures to be used to generate an editable mesh. This is a great tool for the modelling of organic shapes and Topologies. Image based modelling tools in 5.0 provide an integrated environment which delivers a much more flexible solution. Perfect for pre-visualisation and animation guidance, textured models can be exported to all major 3D applications.
ntegrated Z depth
extraction tools assign depth data, on a per pixel basis, to sequences for exporting as a grey map or as a 3D mesh. This data can be viewed within PFTrack, in 3D, using the new orthographic view options which can then be broken down into any number of layers."PFTrack works well for fast moving, blurry sequences in which other tracking software would struggle. Even auto-tracking a scene, two keys were normally all that were needed to get a good track. In many shots in Underdog, dogs turned away from the camera while they were talking. Using PFTrack with a mesh picked up more information in these situations so that we would just add a key and the track would update from there. With other programs I found that once the whole head was out of shot it would need laborious hand tracking to complete the move." Amy Lloyd, Matchmove Artist, Cinesite
Major new features, the heavily optimised tracking engine and most complete tracking environment available makes PFTrack 5.0 the only match mover you will ever need! This technology now allows shots that would previously be impossible to track in any other software, to be quickly and simply processed, so enhancing functionality and speed across the production environment.
Geometry Tracking
- Import .obj models from 3D Applications to use as tracking guides
- Per Vertex weight painting to imporve tracking of complex shots
- Fast head and face replacement using imported geometry
- Track set models into footage for set extensions
- View geometry as wire frame, transparent and flat shaded modes
- Full geometry manipulation tools
- Key frame tracking for greater accuracy
- Vertex to Pixel pinning
Stereoscopic Tracking
- Support for dual camera solve of Left and Right Eye
- Automatic calculation of Occular distance and convergence point
- Rendering of Anaglyph preview movie complete with tracking markers
Camera Solver
- Major Speed Improvments
- Motion Capture Solver (Multiple Cameras)
- Extented Camera Motion Types
- Reference Frame support
- Independant Motion Group Solving
- Partial Solve Saving
- Delete camera path over a range of frames
Object Tracking
- Track individual rigid moving objects
- Export object data independantly of camera motion
Focal length estimation
- Intuative 3D estimation tool
- Calculate accurate focal lengths with no camera data
Editable F-Curves
- Edit any camera parameter within PFTrack and resolve quickly
- Editable visual display of Camera and Tracking errors
Integrated Z depth extraction
- Extract per pixel depth from moving images
- View pixel depth as 3D image
- User defined depth layer generation
- Export of Z depth data as grey map or mesh
Integrated image based modeling tools
- Auto-Mesh modelling tool
- Vertex based primitive modelling
- Full texture extraction and mapping
- Export of geometry to all major 3D systems
Optical Flow Analysis
- Optical flow calculation algorithm
- Proxy resolution flow field support
- Brush-based flow editing tools
- Matte and feature-based flow control
- Export to floating-point and RGB images
- Option to ignore specific user/auto-features from the camera solve
- Multiple undo for features and mattes
- Cross Platform 64-bit application environment
Support for Cooke lens I-Data - Review movie
- New support for Autodesk FBX and Apple Motion
- Semi automatic lens distortion correction
- Comprehensive image manipulation tools
- Ability to snap user loadable test objects to features
- Object manipulators to help position test objects
- Edit range of frames
- Improved Survey Data management
- Improved matte editing functionality
- Matte-feature attachment
- Improved image manipulation algorithms
- Support for graphics tablets
- Improved calibration algorithm, giving more accurate calibrations of difficult shots
- Motion capture for matchmoving non-rigid objects
- Survey data points to assist calibration of measured scenes
- Feature grouping to manage exported data points
- Planar and linear feature constraints in bundle adjustment
- Improved feature tracking engine
- Improved free-motion camera calibration engine
- Per-camera and per-feature statistics (numerical and graph), to help clean up calibration data.
- Improved batch manager progress reports
- On-screen cache indicator, and improved frame caching algorithm
- Improved Shake support, with corner-pin script export
- Per-user-feature footage brightness/contrast/etc.. manipulations
- Image de-noise functions for improved tracking of noisy footage
- Accelerated footage import and playback
- Reduced memory usage when auto-tracking long shots
- Improved Batch Processing
- Render an Open GL preview to disk
- Full Mac OS X 10.5 support
- Support for Windows Vista
PFTrack 5.0 is supported on the following Platforms with these recommended requirements*:
Supported Operating Systems
Windows XP and Vista
Mac OS X 10.4 and 10.5 (Universal)
Most Linux OS's provided they meet current hardware requirements
Processor
1GHz Intel Pentium
Dual Core Intel Recommended
Hard Disk Space
Installation requires 100mb
Suitable space to store footage to be tracked
Memory
512MB
Graphics Card
Must support OpenGL.
Working with Large Images
For working with HD and film, it is recommended that a multi-processor system with at least 1GB of RAM should be used.
A fast disk subsystem for loading large image sequences
Spreading processing across clusters via batch processing will result in enormous productivity enhancements
Mouse
A three-button mouse is required for maximum functionality of the software.
* Machine requirements will vary based on project size and your needs from the software. While PFTrack will function on machines with a lesser spec than these listed, we feel these are the minimum requirements required to use the software comfortably at standard resolution Video Formats (NTSC and PAL). If you have any queries regarding hardware support our support team will be more than happy to assist you with specifying hardware that suits both your budget and projects.
