We lead, others follow....
PFTrack, launched in 2003, quickly established itself as the Match Mover of choice for high-end visual effects productions, when its ground breaking features quickly brought revolutionary new tools to the desk top, including many firsts; integrated optical flow, geometry tracking, true 3D Stereoscopic solves, multiple motion solving and per pixel Z depth extraction. Since its inception, a rapidly growing number of renowned visual effects companies use Pixel Farm products and PFTrack in particular, these include: Sony Imageworks, The Mill, UbiSoft, Riot, Stan Winston Studios, Digital Domain, Cinesite, Double Negative, The Orphanage, CORE Digital, MPC and Animal Logic.
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.
Geometry tracking allows per vertex weighting using a brush tool.
Image courtesy of John Downer Productions
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.To see this in action download our demo movie here.
Stereoscopic footage is fully supported allow a true 3D workflow
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.
Reference frame support gives depth to 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.
Users based graph editing to compensate for tracking and RMS errors.
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.
PFTrack's Motion Capture features save time as well as money and come for free!.
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.
Integrated 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
