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User Guide for Furnace 3.1 for Autodesk Media

1. Figure 15 5 Roller blader The Foundry Furnace 114 EDGEMATTE EdgeMatte Introduction This chapter looks at the creation of mattes from edge informa tion in images using Furnace s assisted roto plug in F_EdgeMatte For hints tips tricks and feedback please visit http support thefoundry co uk F_EdgeMatte is a snap to tool designed to save you time whilst rotoing You simply draw a very loose line around the object of interest In this plug in we refer to this input line as the roto and this is shown in Figure 16 1 as the black line connecting the white squares The algorithm automatically finds the most likely edge and displays it in pink as shown in Figure 16 1 The algorithm then fits a spline along this edge This is called the edge roto and this is what we export for use elsewhere Figure 16 1 F_EdgeMatte Although the algorithm uses spatial information only the out put edge rotos operate as normal allowing keyframes to be set in exactly the same way as you would perform a manual rotoscoping job F_EdgeMatte uses colour edge information to try and fit the outline of an object It will only work if a reasonable edge exists The parameter Output Gradient displays the infor mation the algorithm uses to find the edge If no obvious edge is visible in this image it is unlikely to give a good result If the edge is very soft such as hair fur or extreme motion blur F_EdgeMatte is not suitable and
2. Figure 26 5 This shows two possible selection regions that contain no edge detail and little luminance variation Position the red rectangular onscreen sample region over an area of the grain image just containing grain and no picture detail It helps to view the second input F2 while positioning the box Your selection is important to get right You should avoid any image detail or even a plain area that has luminance variations underneath the grain The better this initial selec tion the better the result will be See Figure 26 5 If you can t find a decent sample area on the frame then try other frames from the same film stock The default size of the sample area should be enough to gather information about the grain char acteristics of your image However you may need to change its size and shape to fit over a plain area free of image detail There is a minimum size of this sample area below which the statisti cal analysis of the grain will be unreliable The on screen tool is locked accordingly See Proxy Resolutions on page193 Once you have positioned the sample area view the result F4 to judge the results The output will now contain the first input image with grain from the second input image applied Both the size and the luminance of the new grain can be manually tweaked using Tuning Scale and Gain parameters respectively The Foundry Furnace 168 REGRAIN Grain Stocks Response To add grain fro
3. Furnace The Foundry Parameters 187 Roto Matte Crops Note Figure 29 10 Original Image have a bollard that we wish to remove You will note the dom inant left right texture in the image To get a good repair as shown in Figure 29 11 we need a large searchSizeX and a small searchSizeY If we do the opposite we get a poor repair as shown in Figure 29 12 Figure 29 11 Good Figure 29 12 Bad In Figure 29 10 we have a bollard that we wish to remove You will note the dominant leftright texture in the image To get a good repair as shown in 29 11 we need a large X Search Range and a small Y Search Range If we do the opposite we get a poor repair as shown in 29 12 Search Range is measured from the missing pixel to the edge of the search region If the missing region is large Search Range must be set large enough to cover both the missing region and a reasonable amount of undamaged image in order to find suitable repair pixels Use Guess dictates how strictly the repaired image has to follow the guidelines shown in guess See Roto Matte Tool on page 25 See Crops on on page 33 The Foundry Furnace 188 SMARTFILL Examples Trafalgar Square Belle The image for the following example can be downloaded from our web site In this example we will remove a lamppost using F_SmartFill Don t expect a perfect result You re not going to get one but you will really quickly get a resul
4. The Foundry Furnace 34 COMMON CONTROLS Figure 3 14 Crop Controls e Reflect mirrors the image at the boundary e Repeat repeats the last line of pixels at the boundary e Colour uses a solid colour This colour is set by the colour pot at the bottom of this group of controls Y Crop sets the behaviour of the image at its top and bottom boundaries e Wrap uses the pixels from the opposite edge Fig ure 3 18 on the facing page e Reflect mirrors the image at the boundary Figure 3 17 on the next page e Repeat repeats the last line of pixels at the boundary Figure 3 16 on the facing page e Colour uses a solid colour Figure 3 15 on the next page This colour is set by the colour pot at the bottom of this group of controls Left sets the position of the left crop Right sets the position of the right crop Bottom sets the position of the bottom crop Top sets the position of the top crop Colour sets the colour that will fill the image outside the crop boundaries if the cropping method is set to Colour In the this example the image of the elephant has been cropped on all sides The behaviour of the pixels is shown for all four cropping methods Furnace The Foundry Box 35 Box Figure 3 15 Colour Figure 3 16 Repeat r O Figure 3 17 Reflect Figure 3 18 Wrap The area sampled for motion or texture is defined by the red rectangular box show
5. See Roto Matte Tool on page 25 Crops See Crops on on page 33 Examples All the images for the following examples can be downloaded from our web site Hedge In this example we have a non uniform and complex flicker over a moving leaf background Download File deflickerhedge tar gz Furnace The Foundry Examples 89 Figure 11 5 Flickering Hedge Step by Step 1 Import the hedge tif clip and play The flicker is quite subtle so you re going to have to watch it loop for a while While you re doing that note that there is lots of movement in the leaves 2 Load F_DeFlicker and click on the hedge We don t need Copy or GlobalMatte inputs so click on any two other clips or use the hedge again 3 Since there is lots of movement in the shot set Refer ence to Previous and process Now compare it to the original Bus This is an unusual example The flicker here is a global lumi nance flicker over the moving bus and static background Set Reference to either the Previous or Specified It doesn t mat ter that much because we re going to ignore all motion anyway and only deflicker globally To do this set the Motion Thresh very low and process Try rendering with Reference method set to Specified and then Previous Note that the results are similar but for a slight luma gain over the sequence in the latter Download File deflickerbus tar gz The Foundry Furnace 90 DEFLICKER Nor Ap science
6. Foundry FLEXIm Tools FFT 4 0v8 or later for floating license support New Features Versions now built for FFFIS 2007 RHEL4 Improvements Licensing The ability to return a floating license to the server after a period of inactivity has been added Previously a license would be returned only if the spark was unloaded or the application quit To enable this feature you must Furnace The Foundry Release Notes 233 Furnace 3 0v2 install FFT4 0v8 or later and use the environment variable FOUNDRY_HEARTBEAT DISABLE true Fixed Bugs 1 F_SmartFill BUG ID 757 fixed a bug that would cause occasional crashes in batch 2 Batch BUG ID 691 numerous bugs fixed that would cause crashes in batch on Irix 3 F_ Kronos BUG ID 758 bug giving stuttering retiming in Kronos This has been fixed Known Bugs Workarounds 1 Although this version is better than 3 0v2 some inter mittent stability issues remain in Batch As a workaround use the plug ins in Desktop mode 2 F_ Kronos BUG ID 609 when applied ith timing method set to speed and speed set to 100 results in an offset of 1 frame between input and output As a aworkaround apply with method set to frame and keyframe 1 on the first frame and the final frame on the final frame 3 F WireRemoval BUG ID 451 shearing on the repair is visible on shallow wires that go off screen bottom or left but only if the sinc filtering is switched on
7. FURNACE BY THE FOUNDRY User Guide for Furnace 3 1 for Autodesk Media amp Entertainment Systems 2nd December 2008 VISUAL EFFECTS SOFTWARE The Foundry VISUAL EFFECTS SOFTWARE 2008 The Foundry Visionmongers Ltd All rights reserved User Guide for Furnace 3 1 for Autodesk Media amp Entertainment Systems This manual as well as the software described in it is furnished under license and may only be used or copied in accordance with the terms of such license This manual is provided for informational use only and is subject to change without notice The Foundry assumes no responsibility or liability for any errors or inaccuracies that may appear in this book No part of this manual may be reproduced stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form without the prior written permission of The Foundry The Foundry logo is a trademark of The Foundry Autodesk Autodesk Media and Entertainment Discreet Flame Flint Fire Inferno and Smoke are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Autodesk Inc Autodesk Canada Inc in the USA and or other countries All other brand names product names or trademarks belong to their respective holders The Foundry algorithms use the FFTW library developed by Matteo Frigo and Steven G Johnson copyright 2003 Matteo Frigo copyright 2003 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved Used under terms of a commercial license http www fftw org Software engineering
8. Furnace The Foundry End User License Agreement 245 SECTION 3 BACK UP COPY a project produced by Licensee an Authorized Project e allow or permit anyone other than Licensee and Licensee s authorized employees to the extent they are working on an Authorized Project to use or have access to the Software or Documentation f copy or install the Software or Documen tation other than as expressly provided for herein or g take any action or fail to take action that could adversely affect the trademarks service marks patents trade secrets copy rights or other intellectual property rights of The Foundry or any third party with intellectual property rights in the Software each a Third Party Licensor Furthermore for purposes of this Section 2 the term Software shall include any derivatives of the Software Licensee shall install and use only a single copy of the Software on one computer unless the Software is installed in a float ing license environment in which case Licensee may install the Software on more than one computer provided however Licensee shall not at any one time use more copies of the Software than the total number of valid Software licenses pur chased by Licensee Furthermore the Software can be licensed on an interactive or non interactive basis Licensee shall be authorized to use a non interactive version of the Software for rendering pur poses only i e on a CPU
9. Examples 137 Figure 19 1 Output image with poor thresholds 3 Set lowerThreshold to 0 2 The outside path is reason able now so click createKeyFrame to create a roto at that frame It should appear as in Figure 19 2 Figure 19 2 Output image 4 Got to frame 11 and create another keyframe You should now be able to scroll through the timeline be tween frame 1 and 11 and get a reasonable result from the interpolation If you wanted to create keyframes throughout the sequence you could use the createAl IKeyFrames button with a skipFrames of 1 The Foundry Furnace 138 MOTIONBLUR MotionBlur This chapter looks at adding motion blur using Furnace s plug in F_MotionBlur For hints tips tricks and feedback please visit http support thefoundry co uk Introduction MotionBlur uses the Foundry s advanced motion estimation technology to add realistic motion blur to a sequence F_MotionBlur uses the same techniques and technology as the motion blur found in F_Kronos but presents the controls in a less complex more user friendly way However if you need precise control over the motion vectors used for adding blur you should use F Kronos Quick Start Select a suitable Shutter Time depending on the amount of blur you wish to add Process the sequence to see the motion blurred result Increasing Shutter Samples will result in more inbetween images being used to generate the motion blur and so result in
10. Figure 3 12 Bezier Figure 3 13 Polygon Tran Y sets the vertical position of the roto shape Change this to move the shape up and down This is linked to the onscreen red cross hair Rotation this controls the rotation of the roto and is linked to the onscreen green anchor in the roto axis Scale sets the size of the roto shape Change this to make the shape bigger and smaller This is linked to the onscreen blue rectangle Scale X sets the horizontal size of the roto shape Increase this to stretch the shape width This is linked to the vertical edges of the onscreen blue rectangle Scale Y sets the vertical size of the roto shape Increase this to stretch the shape height This is linked to the horizontal edges of the onscreen blue rectangle Add Roto Key this will add a keyframe to the roto animation at the current frame Delete Roto Key this will delete a keyframe from the roto animation if one exists at the current frame Delete Animation this will delete all keyframes from the roto animation but it will keep the current roto Delete Roto this will delete all keyframes from the roto an imation and delete the current roto as well This group of seven controls Figure 3 14 enables the image to be cropped and defines the value of pixels outside the rect angular cropping area X Crop sets the behaviour of the image at its left and right boundaries e Wrap uses the pixels from the opposite edge
11. IRIX64 F_DirtRemoval F_DeFicker and other plug ins re ported running extremely slowly on multiprocessing ma chines running 64 bit versions of Flame 9 5 beta 4 or In ferno 6 5 1 Problem appears less severe in Flame 9 5 1 A number of changes to fix this have been implemented 2 F_EdgeMatte Snap to Edge button causes a crash if no roto is drawn This has been fixed 3 F_DirtRemoval BUG ID 594 a frame offset problem in batch has been fixed The Foundry Furnace 236 APPENDIX A Furnace 2 0v1 4 F_MotionSmooth BUG ID 593 slips by one frame in batch 5 This has been fixed F_BlockTexture BUG ID 559 not working in irix32 This has been fixed Known Bugs amp Workarounds 1 F_Kronos BUG ID 609 when applied with timing method set to speed and speed set to 100 results in an offset on 1 frame between input and output As a workaround apply with method set to frame and keyframe frame 1 on the first frame and the final frame on the final frame F_WireRemoval BUG ID 451 shearing on the repair is visible on shallow wires that go offscreen bottom or left but only if sinc filtering is switched on On Linux 64 machines plug ins may take up to 9 seconds to enter the editing menu Not all machines are affected in this way This is a major new release of Furnace on Discreet with 10 new plug ins improvements and support for Irix64 Release Date 1 July 2005 Requirements Flame Flint Fire Infern
12. Make sure that the Source Length parameter is set to 100 this is the length of the Source clip 7 Press the Set Default Timing button 8 Go to the animation sheet and make sure Source Frame is selected before hitting Frame Chn You should see the default time remapping as a Hermite curve Linear may be a better default but since we re going to add new keyframes anyway the Hermite curve will be more natural 9 Go back to the first page of controls 10 Switch the Show popup to Show Mix You ll see the Reference clip mixed with the Source Note the misalign ment of the background 11 Set the Analyse control to None Click the Find Tempo ral Match button and wait You should see that the new The Foundry Furnace 74 CORRELATE 20 Source Frame chosen for this Reference frame is frame 21 You ll see that the alignment in the mix is better but not as close as we might wish for Click the Find Temporal Match button a second time The Source Frame should now be 41 which is close but still not perfect Click the Find Temporal Match button a third time The Source Frame should now be 50 and the background alignment should be pretty close Go to the end of the sequence on the timeline frame 100 Click the Find Temporal Match button You ll see that this time the Source Frame chosen doesn t move from 100 This is in fact as good as it s going to get tempo rally This is beca
13. Parameters 223 Location particularly noticeable on large wire widths and should usually be left switched on Show sets some render options e Repair removes the wire between the start and end points e Wire Matte renders a matte for the wire This may be useful to output if the wires have been tracked but the wire cannot be repaired using Furnace and other tech niques have to be used Rolling Repair selecting this mimics a clean plate technique to remove a wire from a sequence The first frame should be repaired using one of the reconstruction methods and the po sition of the wire should be keyframed Switching on rolling re pair and rendering will repair each subsequent frame by track ing the repaired first frame into the relevant region This tech nique will only work on backgrounds that are not deforming over the clip so buildings would work but clouds will not WireRemoval with rolling repair switched on cannot be dis tributed across multiple machines on a network render farm See Network Rendering on page 19 Curved Wire switch this on to use the centre point of the wire Import Track click on this button to import tracking data that has been previously exported from Stabilizer Note that you should export the Track X and Track Y data for use here and not the Shift X and Shift Y data Start X the horizontal position of one end of the wire in pixels Start Y the vertical position of one end
14. The Foundry Furnace 62 COLOURMATTE Inputs Parameters Figure 8 4 Foreground composited over mid grey using matte generated from F_ColourMatte Ideally the foreground and background matte inputs should be drawn as tight as possible to the unknown region If they are fairly loose it is worth increasing the Levels parameter This should speed up the rendering time F_ColourMatte has four inputs source foreground background and Known Background The source is the image from which you will try to extract a foreground The foreground is a matte specifying those regions which are definitely foreground pixels alpha 1 and background is a matte specifying those regions which are definitely background pixels alpha 0 Optionally a clean background plate Known Background can also be sup plied The parameters for this plug in are described below Output displays either the unpremultiplied foreground or the background The alpha is automatically associated with the foreground e Test Comp renders the foreground over a flat colour using the generated matte e Matte renders the matte generated by the algorithm e Background renders the unpremultiplied background e Foreground renders the unpremultiplied foreground Furnace The Foundry Parameters 63 Colour Selection three possible techniques are used to choose initial guesses of the foreground and background colours at an unknown pixel e
15. and you as either an individual or a single entity Licensee In consideration of the mutual covenants contained herein and for other good and valuable consideration the receipt and sufficiency of which is acknowledged by each party hereto the parties agree as follows Subject to the limitations of Section 2 The Foundry hereby grants to Licensee a limited non transferable and non exclusive license to install and use a machine readable object code ver sion of this software program the Software and the ac companying user guide and other documentation collectively the Documentation solely for Licensee s own internal busi ness purposes collectively the License provided however Licensee s right to install and use the Software and the Doc umentation is limited to those rights expressly set out in this Agreement Licensee is authorized to use the Software in machine read able object code form only and Licensee shall not a assign sublicense transfer pledge lease rent share or export the Software the Documentation or Licensee s rights hereunder b alter or circumvent the copy protection mechanisms in the Software or reverse engineer decompile disassemble or oth erwise attempt to discover the source code of the Software c modify adapt translate or create derivative works based on the Software or Documentation d use or allow the use of the Software or Documentation on any project other than
16. clip name to be incorrect This has been fixed 9 Setup the previous version wrote out setup information in files with suffix set thefoundry txt These have been removed 10 Roto the colour of the roto widget appeared as an ani matable parameter This was a bug that has been fixed Furnace The Foundry Release Notes 243 Furnace 1 0b1 Known Bugs amp Workarounds There are no known bugs This is the first beta release of Furnace on Discreet Requirements Furnace is compiled MIPS4 and requires Irix 6 2 or later on R8000 R10000 or R5000 microprocessors fire 5 3 smoke 5 3 and inferno 5 3 flame 8 3 and flint 8 3 are supported fffis 7 5 versions and later are likely to work New Features Not applicable Improvements Not applicable Bug Fixes Not applicable Known Bugs amp Workarounds There are no known bugs The Foundry Furnace 244 APPENDIX B Appendix B End User License Agreement SECTION 1 GRANT OF LICENSE SECTION 2 RESTRICTIONS ON USE IMPORTANT BY INSTALLING THIS SOFTWARE YOU ACKNOWL EDGE THAT YOU HAVE READ THIS AGREEMENT UNDERSTAND IT AND AGREE TO BE BOUND BY ITS TERMS AND CONDITIONS IF YOU DO NOT AGREE TO THE TERMS OF THIS AGREEMENT DO NOT INSTALL COPY OR USE THE SOFTWARE This END USER SOFTWARE LICENSE AGREEMENT this Agree ment is made by and between The Foundry Visionmongers Ltd acompany registered in England and Wales The Foundry
17. e Matte outputs the alpha channel calculated e Foreground outputs a premultiplied result Foreground Region sets the mask used to define the area of repair This can be set to the second input or a rotomatte e None no user supplied garbage mask e Mask use the second input to the plug in as a garbage mask e Roto use the built in roto tools to define a garbage mask See Roto Matte Tool on page 25 The following images show some typical results composited over grey Note that the plug in doesn t handle motion blurred foregrounds well The best results are for sequences where the foreground has a distinct motion which differs clearly from the background and where the foreground is a single compact mass occupying approximately half the screen area See 21 1 on the next page Moderate result Much of the matte is well defined although the fast moving motion blurred regions and the non moving arm are poorly defined The Foundry Furnace 144 MOTIONMATTE Figure 21 1 Original Figure 21 2 Alpha result Figure 21 3 Foreground result over grey Family See 21 4 on the facing page Very poor result The motion of the foreground relative to the background is too small Quadbike See 21 7 on the next page A good result There is some erroneous pickup of background regions Footballers See 21 10 on page 146 A good result There is some poor definition of the matte where the footballers
18. multiple objects moving fast in multiple direc tions we are unable to correctly calculate the motion This means both the dirt detection and repair will fail In order to improve results in these regions we have a complex motion detector This detector is designed to flag regions where we are unlikely to calculate the correct motion In these regions we detune the motion based dirt detector and add a spatial dirt detector Only if both detectors flag dirt do we actually believe there to be dirt Load F_DirtRemoval and select the sequence to be cleaned and optionally a matte specifying the dirt Set the Plate Size to the original size of the scan not the size of any cropped region you may be analysing and render Using the output parameter see where the dirt has been detected and removed and vary the aggression level using the Preset as required If regions of motion have been incorrectly classified as dirt change the aggression level in the preset or read the section on complex motion detection and tune the parameters If dirt has been missed try increasing the aggression level in the preset or manually tune the parameters under dirt detection Furnace The Foundry Inputs 109 Inputs Parameters Dirt F_DirtRemoval has two inputs the dirty sequence source and an optional matte input dirt indicating the position of the dirt in the sequence The parameters for this plug in are described below Presets this
19. ski SAGE Ow ES AAMAS REESE SLANE RS AAS 96 DeNoise 98 A ioe eiee ee da RA OC DEBS de OHS 98 OE STAT s ok eK a a AE a ts aa A ee we ed E a 98 MM a 65 oo pe ta oe eee ee ee eee eee 99 Parameters oeae be oe ae we eee oe ee Ee Re OEE ret Se Sex 99 po be maa a 4 ar a E E ws A Se A ee a 99 Pees caaea d trene ERA AA OES OSES a EX 99 MIKE AAA AA 100 Depth 103 troduction oa caa ra A ORS A RRE AA NA a 103 A O A es de ee oe a oe ts E a 103 ee ee em we oe A 104 Parameters sa toi Eke Ce ee CE Kk OER CK SE SE ee 104 o o Bone ep oe Ewe CRS Hee SELEY EDS ESE DS 104 Sees gt 00 id DARA ASSESS OE EAD EEE AR 104 Leicester AI 104 DirtRemoval 107 IDEN cres radar a AAA AAA 107 CUM REMERA dde OO dde e ee k 108 II e ee 4 o a EAE A AAA dd Eee 109 Parameters six ea a A as Cex 109 Pe da e da od e 109 o e depos Bee Wy BA Be Ne Sw Be oe ee ee ae a ee 112 PROMS so 6c eo Ree ae Oe Oe CO ee ee ew ee ae 112 Roller blades gt s 406 Va OE OES ES CERES AES OE MESES HESS 112 The Foundry Furnace viii Contents EdgeMatte 114 Introduction De e ARA SS GS AAA 114 Quick SEart 2 ias sa We hoe a 115 WOE see ow PA Oe BAER KEW BASS ORS EW RASS AAA 116 PaaS 66 9 ea SA A RARE AERA AA AR 116 EdgeMatte ica EWS AAA eh Eh eR Se 116 Examples lt a e AAA OMe a HEA ERS AOS 119 DS ke hae ee he ARA Bt oh ke de a a a 119 Kronos 122 IEC re hE AYA MOE EA EWE A AT 122 Quick Start os ka ee aw oe RD ew A ER a ews 122 Speed gt a4 bak b RR AAA OMS AERA SMES 4 a 122 POO
20. 163 178 209 Stock 170 Stop Colour 224 Stop X 223 Stop Y 223 Stretch to Fit 216 Temporal 95 Temporal Consistency 51 206 Thickness 221 Threshold 78 136 Tile Bottom 216 Tile Horizontally 216 Tile Left 216 Tile Right 216 Tile Top 216 Tile Vertically 216 Timing 125 Top 34 Translate 38 57 71 163 210 Translate X 194 Translate Y 194 Tran X 32 Tran Y 33 Tune 95 Tune Blue 95 99 Furnace The Foundry Index 257 Tune Green 95 99 Tune Huge 95 Tune Large 95 Tune Master 99 Tune Medium 95 Tune Red 95 99 Tune Small 95 Use Analysis 99 Use Bias Matte 160 Use Channel 54 Use Every Nth Frame 176 Use Guess 187 Use Known Background 63 Use Only Marked Frames 177 Use Reference 54 Use Region 57 79 Use Sampled Response 172 Valid Frame 149 Variance Thresh 87 Vector Detail 70 126 149 152 Vertex Distance 135 Weight 195 Weight Thresh 55 Wipe 171 Wire Colour 224 X Centre 99 X Crop 33 X Roto Start 136 X Search Range 186 Y Centre 99 Y Crop 34 Y Roto Start 136 Y Search Range 186 The Foundry Furnace
21. 20 2 Shutter Time 50 100 Shutter Samples sets the number of in between images used to create an output image during the shutter time Increase this value for smoother motion blur Figure 20 3 Shutter Samples Figure 20 4 Shutter Samples 2 20 Matte controls whether or not to use the Mask clip The clip can be used to improve the quality of the motion estimation and hence the motion blur by telling the algorithm what is fore ground and background in the image White areas of the mask are considered to be foreground and black areas background e None the mask is not used to help the algorithm e Luminance the luminance is used e Inverted Luminance the inverted luminance is used The Foundry Furnace 140 MOTIONBLUR Examples BelleWalking All the images for the following example can be downloaded from our web site This example we ll use F_MotionBlur to add motion blur to the sequence Step by Step 1 2 Import the BelleMatte clip Play the clip to get a sense of the motion Got to frame 16 on the time line this merely gives a better example than the initial frames Load the F_MotionBlur spark Click on the spark button then the BelleMatte on the reels Set Shutter Time to 10 and Shutter Samples 10 You should get an image as in Figure 20 5 Figure 20 5 Output image We can see the individual samples still for example at the back of the dress and the righthand
22. 4 2 Screenshot Flip the display between the Reference F2 and the Re sult F4 and note that we now aligned a frame five frames ago with the current frame This provides a rapid mechanism for aligning a cleaner frame elsewhere in the sequence over the foreground bike object in the current frame Switch Perspective on to adjust for the slight perspective shift between the frames Perspective is a very processor intensive option but the match between the two frames around the windows on the top right should be slightly better Process and Exit to the reels The output clip can now be used as a source of pixels to remove the motorbike To do this we need a matte of the bike that will define the region to paint through We can use the roto tools in F_Align From the reels select F_Align and load the bike The Foundry Furnace 42 ALIGN 10 11 Reset All View the Source F1 and select the Roto Mask edit group Move to frame 1 Toggle Masking Box to Masking Roto and click and drag over the image to draw a rotospline around the bike It does not have to be accurate we just need a rough shape Note that clicking control points to define the spline will not create a roto You have to click and drag to draw a line Release the mouse pen when you re near the start to complete the closed shape Figure 4 3 Roto screenshot Figure 4 4 Close up of roto 12 14 You need to keyframe the roto sha
23. 6 5 eA ER ROE EE ERE PARES EE HERES EASES AA 221 LOCA nko Wainy A Oe RS ae AA A RS E 223 Examples ein crasas eN RAR OV ORR RES ES 224 POS oe We we we DOR oe oe Re ERR RRS ob RRS 224 SA ive a eee AAA ARANA A 225 Bricks o 6644 0 RE EAS REA ARIAS 226 Furnace The Foundry Contents xv Appendix A 229 Release Notes oo EGS eH ERE S EOE Re A RA A A 229 F rnace VU rise ADA Se ES EERE EERE CAH RES 229 Furnace 3 0VG ces os RAR A A EOS EO Ow 230 Famace Oe 04 Sk ME Se eS ROE RSH SDE RE ORE re 230 PINES AVE y SR EE ER Oe ee PE oe ER ad Hd 231 FORSTER A ek Oe BER ESM Oe CR Oe Ow A G 232 FUISTE BO orando AAA HE BAER OHS ERG 233 FUIMSLE ZOVA ar derredor dee cae o en 235 e o 66 6 5 A ERE EGER AE EES GES 236 Furnace LAGS ky 6 5 ee Oe SG ER EER A ee Se Ee 237 FUISTE UNG ada REE ERE AAA AA 238 So oci he Bek hw OR OR eRREERER OO DRE SE BERR a 239 FUMISEE LODA oser saia OSES HOD ERAS OES SEES 240 POE LODS y as a GIES RA oS ee ee ea ee 240 Furnace QUA nn a a er 241 Furnace A 243 Appendix B 244 End User License Agreement o ee ee ee ee ene 244 Appendix C 252 Kronos Algorithm 64 566 65 k A HEE AE RE EAE REE AAA 252 IMErOdUCHOM oc we ORS ER EER A ee Se EY 252 Terminology seras ER SAREE AAA AA 252 Producing VEROS lt o e be a ve Oe wo eS EE EES Oe eee 253 Index 254 The Foundry Furnace 16 INTRODUCTION Introduction About this User Guide Notation Example Images Installing Furnace on Discreet
24. A a ee 164 Eam E e a oe a e a a ee ee a ew Ee E deae 164 VAIS oe A a R E Ee PGs E a E 164 ReGrain 166 WOMEN seess KEG EA aami esana AAA AAA 166 Quick Start ee ns 167 os A 168 RESPONSE A ee OE RE OG Me Oe ee SS 168 Checking the Result 64 eh the eR aa eRe ee Ree ES 169 Proxy Resolutions 03 AA AR Ea we OES DY AS A 169 MUTS ee ce Bee ae ee we hee dl oe de Be ee es eee we eee 170 Paraitmieters es ok ee BR BA ek See oa Ke Oe ee ds G 170 RED I ek oe oie ue ek a we ek ee oe a ee 170 RESPONSE So oie Se ee Eek hw Re SEA oe SS 171 EMDE ws eu pl oe dl ee de a we ee al do Ok ee 172 a A IIA 172 RESPONSE A ee aes 172 RigRemoval 173 IMPI cia A A A Cee Se Eee 173 Bre SAE e coa dd a a a aa a Be bn we 173 USO uo A A e e o EA A ee EES 175 II e o de ap al ee ade e ra de a de we Le E ir de a 176 Parameters 64 REE AAA AAA AA ARA S 176 The Foundry Furnace xii Contents is Bes eS 8S eRe ee eee oe Se es 176 Be a hk ods ee a ee ee ee oe ee ee 178 Roto Mask 245 6 WASSER R OEE EE EH eS EMS SAGE GS 179 Examples 6 4 4 4 654445 5488 OSHS SORE ESE AGES HS DES 179 A EE ERAS amp AO 180 ScratchRepair 181 Ih ie ek a a ee ee ee A 181 CWC SAME eo eos oe Be PRS ae 6 BOA A Be ee ee 182 OMS ke Bore pss qe So ve ue We he ee vc we ye de we a we ee al 182 Paramet a AAA CHR ARE RE AEE OE A AEE AT 182 RECO a DEAR AAA RRA eS 183 o A 183 SmartFill 184 introduction iodo a E ORS ERAS AMAN AA 184 NEN SEALE Saca a es A en iaa Gudea Bee Ra a
25. F MatteToRoto plug in for each object F_MatteToRoto allows you to create key frames at user spec ified positions The position of the rotoshape on the in be tween frames will then be interpolated in exactly the same manner that you would expect from a standard Discreet roto shape The plug in also offers the ability to delete individual key frames or all the key frames Apply F_MatteToRoto to the matte image Position the cross hair near the edge of the matte you wish to turn into a ro toshape Click on Create Key to create a rotoshape for this frame Scroll through the sequence creating key frames where necessary Use the Delete Key or Delete All Keys button to remove key frames as necessary F_MatteToRoto has just one input which is the matte image that is to be turned in to a roto The parameters for this spark are described below Vertex Distance the distance between vertices Increase this for a more accurate rotoshape with more vertices Passes the number of attempts made to find a path around the matte If the matte is complex you may need to increase this number to prevent the path finding dead ends Create Key creates a key frame on the current frame The Foundry Furnace 136 MATTETOROTO Threshold if the matte has a soft edge the plug in thresholds using this value the matte to create the main vertices of the rotoshape X Roto Start the horizontal position of the start point Y Roto Start the
26. F_ColourMatte should be used instead Furnace The Foundry Quick Start 115 Quick Start The trick to this plug in is to know when to stop adjusting the pink edge and export edge roto which can be edited elsewhere You ll need to practise this Connect an F EdgeMatte plug in to the clip to be rotoed Reset All and draw roughly around the object to be cut out Just click and drag on the image to draw a line When the roto is built an edge is displayed You can adjust the input points click and drag them if the algorithm hasn t quite snapped to the required edge If you need to add more points to get a better fit just click on the line between control points If the edge won t snap to the outline of the object look at Output Gradient to see if the edge is visible in the gradient image If it is and the edge still won t snap to the object try increasing Snap To Range and Edge Freedom If you still can t get it to follow an edge ignore it and move on You can adjust the output roto later Advance a few frames in the timeline as shown in Figure 16 2 Here the head has moved position but the input roto has stayed in the same place Note that the edge has tried to snap to this new position At this point you should move the input roto shape using the red cross hairs to match the new position of the object This is shown in Figure 16 3 You will see that Figure 16 2 Frame 1 Figure 16 3 Frame 20 the head has moved positio
27. Furnace The Foundry Fine Tuning 123 Frames Fine Tuning Note fill giving a new total length of 50 original 49 new 99 output frames But for a 50 speed Kronos actually generates two new frames between each original and ignores all the originals so we end up filling 2 frames in each gap giving us 2 49 98 frames altogether Rather than use a speed to define the new motion you can map input frames to output frames For a 50 frame input clip at half speed change the Total Frames from 50 to 100 With Auto Key on move to frame 1 in the Timeline and set Frames to 1 then move to frame 100 and set Frames to 50 Setting these two keys produces an animation curve as shown in Figure 90 Figure 17 3 Half speed retime by keyframing You may find that you get some edge dragging around objects that are moving To improve this you should increase the Vector Detail to use a higher resolution vector field The larger Vector Detail is the greater the processing time but the more accurate the vectors should be A value of 100 will generate a vector at each pixel A value of 50 will generate a vector at every other pixel It is worth noting that in some circumstance you may find that a lower Vector Detail may give smoother more natural looking results even though they are less accurate Kronos estimates motion by first calculating the course mo tion over the whole image and then refining it over progres sively smaller s
28. If you have just one image from which to sample texture you could rotate and scale this to produce another texture image Use the original texture in the second input and the rotated scaled texture for the third input By providing additional texture inputs you will reduce repetition in the generated texture The parameters for this spark are described below Fill switch this on to fill the whole of the area defined by the source image with new texture as opposed to just the region selected by the matte e Roto fills the roto shape with texture e Matte fills the external matte with texture e Screen fills the whole screen with texture Avoid Fill Region switch this on to sample texture from the region that is not specified by the matte Sample Texture 1 switch this on to use the Texture 1 input as a source of the generated texture Sample Texture 2 switch this on to use the Texture 2 input as a source of the generated texture Sample Source switch this on to use the Background input as a source of the generated texture Sample Left the left position of sample region The sample region is shown as a red rectangular box over the image Sample Right the right position of sample region The sam ple region is shown as a red rectangular box over the image Sample Top the top position of sample region The sample region is shown as a red rectangular box over the image Sample Bottom the bottom position of sampl
29. In this example we take a handheld shot of a newspaper and scale it to twice the original size Download File smartzoomnewspaper tar gz Step by Step 1 Start Flame and import the 25 frames of the newspaper clip Play it to get a sense of the motion 2 Use Flame s Format to scale the image from 360x288 to 720x576 Make sure Quality is switched on render and save this clip We ll use this clip to compare F SmartZoom against in Step 8 3 Now repeat this process but pad the outside with black as shown in Figure 31 3 Figure 31 3 Pad to 720x576 4 Apply F_SmartZoom to this padded image 5 View the Source and change the sample area to cover the newspaper as shown in 31 4 6 Set Resize to 2 as we re doubling the size The Foundry Furnace 204 SMARTZOOM Figure 31 4 Edit sample area 7 View the Result and goto frame 1 and render the clip Note that the frame sharpens over the first few frames 8 Compare this clip to the previous saved clip You could use Tinder s T Wipe spark to compare the two clips The temporal subsampling in F SmartZoom clearly gives a sharper result Furnace The Foundry 205 Splicer Introduction Quick Start This chapter looks at stitching images together using Furnace s plug in F_Splicer For hints tips tricks and feedback please visit http support thefoundry co uk F Splicer is designed to composite two images together and hide the join between
30. Irix Welcome to this User Guide for Furnace on Discreet Furnace is a rich collection of image processing tools to help compositors tackle common problems when working on films We have spent several years working closely with universities and post production houses in London developing tools that will save you time This User Guide will tell you how to install and use the Fur nace sparks Licensing Furnace is covered in the separate Foundry FLEX Tools User Guide Throughout this user guide we assume you are familiar with Autodesk Media amp Entertainment Solutions and the machine it is running on All the directory and file names in this document are the 32 bit versions For the 64 bit equivalent simply substitute 64 for 32 in any of the relevant names The phrase Discreet Flame is used to denote any of the compatible Autodesk Media amp Entertainment Solutions Dis creet Flame Discreet Flint Discreet Fire Dis creet Inferno and Discreet Smoke Example images are provided for use with each of the sparks You can download these images from our web site Downloads are available from www thefoundry co uk 1 Log in as root 2 Download the Furnace software You should get a file called Furnace3 1v1_Spark4 0 irix mips release 32 tardist Furnace The Foundry Installing Furnace on Discreet Linux 17 3 Install the default software using the inst command or if you prefer use the
31. Max Motion defines the width of the border around the rig region that is searched in other frames to find the missing pixel data Blend Overlap the repair is built up using slices of infor mation from other frames in the sequence Selecting Blend Overlap merges overlapping edges between these slices and may give a more natural looking repair but at the expense of image sharpness Use Every Nth Frame the repair uses every frame within Look Ahead Frames of the current frame If you switch on Use Every Nth Frame the spark instead looks at frames spaced apart by the value N on the control below So for a value of N equal to 5 only frames 1 6 11 and so on are considered valid for fetching repairs from This can improve performance on clips Furnace The Foundry Parameters 177 where the motion of the foreground object is quite slow relative to the background N the frame spacing to use when Use Every Nth Frame is switched on Luminance Correct switch this on to correct for luminance changes from information taken from other frames This is particularly important if the lighting changes throughout the sequence Perspective switch this on to correct for minor perspective changes In Figure 27 10 a circular roto shape has been used to define the area to be repaired from pixels in other frames Perspective is off and you can see some errors near one of the bollards and on the horizontal lines on the building Swi
32. Median can be used to ensure later frames don t overwrite earlier ones You should note that if there is a large foreground motion in the clip you are using the motion estimation may lock onto that rather than the background motion producing undesirable results Using F_RigRemoval to remove the object before using F_SmartPlate may get you round the problem Possibly the simplest way to use this plug in is the use the Generate Final Plate button This simply steps through the sequence and generates the one final image rather than gen erating the current best plate at each frame Furnace The Foundry Putting the Camera Move Back 193 Putting the Camera Move Back Once you have generated a large plate from a sequence of frames you may wish to paint on the large plate then put the original camera move back over this painted frame F_SmartPlate s second input allows you to do just this For a fully worked example see Liberty Banner You should be aware of the following restrictions 1 SmartPlate doesn t store the transform information in user accessible variables 2 The SmartPlate process unpeels the image sequence flattening camera distortion to produce the large flat plate The restore process doesn t reintroduce any cam era distortion so expect your output results to differ from the input 3 SmartPlate locks on to the dominant motion in the im age We assume for this purpose that the original ma terial contai
33. Simon Robinson Ralph McEntagart Phil Parsonage Algorithms Dr Bill Collis Dr Anil Kokaram of Trinity College Dublin Product testing Jack Binks Jonathan Barson Writing and layout design Jonathan Barson Ralph McEntagart and Dr Bill Collis using ETEXx Proof reading Jack Binks and Jonathan Barson VISUAL EFFECTS SOFTWARE Contents iii Contents Introduction 16 ADOME this User Guid lt lt be ee be CRE Eee AAA Grew oR ERE 16 a ke eR ee eRe TCE ES IIA 16 Example IMANES y gt oh we oe De e DE BER MEDS de GEE 16 Installing Furnace on Discreet Irix 0 2 eee eee ee ee ne 16 installing Furnace on Discreet Linux 1 644 eb wake ee Ew ew eS 17 Installing Furnace on Burn ke ow ek RE eR RAE ORES 17 Licensing FPUrnaCEe sosea oe ee eh eed ee be ee we dee ee eke Ad 18 Removing Furnace froMlriX o o 19 Documentation e sse ees we Oe e A A E 19 Network Rendering lt s lt lt o eo 4 19 About Furnace Plug ins sica RR A OR 20 Other Foundry Products o sierra rinde rra 20 Basics 21 What A SPAR sace a EK EE ER e AE E a aE EEE A 21 Where are the Sparks 25 c 54544 Hes Seba ded a A 21 Lading SOAS AAA 21 Veng SS AAA AAA AR 22 Command and Module Modes lt lt 4 lt 44 eed ee ea we He ORO a 22 A AUN Sond Ae QoS SS ae ad ee eS ae ee eek 22 Common Controls 23 DISA TUS 4 ee ek a Hw AR A ea ee ER OS 23 PEN eos woe ae ie Se ete ee ee ee Se re ee
34. Software and Documentation shall be free from errors that may arise from the electronic file transfer from The Foundry and or its authorized reseller to Licensee and b to the best of The Foundry s knowledge Licensee s use of the Software in accordance with the Doc umentation will not in and of itself infringe any third party s Furnace The Foundry End User License Agreement 247 SECTION 8 LIMITED REMEDY SECTION 9 INDEMNIFICATION copyright patent or other intellectual property rights Ex cept as warranted the Software and Documentation is be ing provided as is THE FOREGOING LIMITED WARRANTY IS IN LIEU OF ALL OTHER WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS EX PRESS OR IMPLIED AND The Foundry DISCLAIMS ANY AND ALL IMPLIED WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS INCLUDING WITH OUT LIMITATION ANY IMPLIED WARRANTY OF TITLE NON INFRINGEMENT MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PAR TICULAR PURPOSE REGARDLESS OF WHETHER The Foundry KNOWS OR HAS REASON TO KNOW OF LICENSEE S PARTICU LAR NEEDS The Foundry does not warrant that the Software or Documentation will meet Licensee s requirements or that Li censee s use of the Software will be uninterrupted or error free No employee or agent of The Foundry is authorized to modify this limited warranty nor to make additional warranties No action for any breach of the above limited warranty may be commenced more than one 1 year after Licensee s initial re ceipt of the Software To the e
35. Spatial button e Spatial perform spatial analysis only Align Spatial will be hidden e None Both buttons appear as no analysis is done dur ing a normal process Find Temporal Match this push button makes the plug in search for a better temporal match than the current value in Source Frame The search is done within Search Range of the current match Note that pressing this twice in a row may give different answers The first press will shift Source Frame and the second press will therefore search a new range of frames around the new Source Frame This button only appears in the UI if Analyse is set to Temporal or None Note that hitting the Analyse button under the Preview button will step through the sequence performing a Find Temporal Match at each frame in the sequence as long as Analyse is set to Temporal or Both Align Spatial this push button spatially aligns the frame cur rently given by Source Frame with the current reference frame Whenever the spatial analysis is done the values are written out to keyframes which can then be tweaked using the supplied overlay control You can however only do this when Analyse is set to Temporal or None This button only appears in the UI if Analyse is set to Temporal or None Note that hitting the Analyse button under the Preview button will step through the sequence performing an Align Spatial at each frame in the sequence as long as Analyse is set to Spatial or Both Show
36. The Foundry Quick Start 219 Rolling Repairs Curved Wires Quick Start Note backgrounds like sky clouds or smoke It fails if the wire crosses backgrounds where there is a noticeable gradient like roofs buildings or cars For that you need the gradient method This method uses a slope dependent filter that interpolates across the wire at the most likely angle given the image behind the wire If that fails you should try inpainting This is a texture based method that tries to find likely pixels from nearby to copy into the wire region This method works better when the wire crosses very detailed random images like leaves or water Inpainting is much slower than simple or gradient If that fails then you could try temporal inpainting This looks on the previous current and next frames for likely pixels to repair the region It will only improve on a straight inpainting repair if the wire is moving in the clip Where traditional clean plates are possible or give better re sults than using Furnace to repair the wire on each frame you can use the rolling repair technique built into F_WireRemoval With this method first track the position of the wire then re pair the first frame with whatever reconstruction method gives the best result on that frame Then switch Rolling Repair on and process the clip This uses the first frame as a clean plate and automatically match moves it to repair the next frame Then each new frame is
37. a smoother blur If you can see that the motion blur has been created from a few discreet images try increasing Shutter Samples If your sequence is composed of a foreground object moving over a background the motion estimation is likely to get con fused at the edge between the two For better results try adding a mask of the foreground region to the mask input This will force the motion of the foreground to be calculated separately to the motion of the background and so should pro duce less artifacts in the motion blur Use Use Mask to select whether there is no mask None or the mask is in the Lumi nance or Inverted Luminance of the image Inputs F MotionBlur takes three inputs The first Motion is the clip that is analysed for motion The second Blur is the clip that will have motion blur applied using the motion vectors from the first input Often these inputs will be the same The third clip is an optional mask which can be used to assist with separating differing motions in the Motion clip Furnace The Foundry Parameters 139 Parameters The parameters for this plug in are described below Shutter Time sets the equivalent shutter time of the re timed sequence A shutter time of 100 is equivalent to averag ing over plus and minus half an input frame which is equivalent to a shutter angle of 360 degrees A shutter time of 0 5 is equivalent to a shutter angle of 180 degrees Figure 20 1 Shutter Time Figure
38. again Furnace The Foundry 181 ScratchRepair Introduction This chapter looks at the removal of scratches from images using Furnace s plug in F_ScratchRepair For hints tips tricks and feedback please visit http support thefoundry co uk F_ScratchRepair is designed to remove vertical scratches from film Within Furnace a scratch is defined as an artefact that appears on each frame thus making it difficult to do a dirt removal style repair by taking clean pixels from the previous and next frame If the scratch appears only on one frame or intermittently better results may be obtained by using F_DirtRemoval Figure 28 1 Image with scratches By default F ScratchRepair uses a spatial repair algorithm which uses the values of nearby undamaged pixels to locally adjust the statistics of the scratched pixels The number of nearby pixels used in the algorithm trades off how much information is taken from the damaged pixels and how much interpolation is performed across the scratch As with F_WireRemoval there is a gradient parameter that specifies the maximum angle of interpolation allowed across the scratch On many scratches a better repair can be achieved by using motion interpolation to take pixels from the previous corrected The Foundry Furnace 182 SCRATCHREPAIR Figure 28 2 Before Figure 28 3 After frame Switching on Motion allows The Foundry s advance mo tion estimation algorithms to
39. an object that has a soft edge for example fur hair Figure 8 1 or motion blurred objects Figure 8 1 ColourMatte can be used to extract a matte from images like this Consider the compositing equation C alpha F 1 alpha B This describes how a pixel of rgb value C is composed of a foreground colour F scaled by alpha and background colour B scaled by alpha The aim of this plug in is given C to deduce values for F Band alpha Obviously this is a very tricky problem as for every three known variables the red green and blue values of C we must estimate seven unknown variables the red green and blue values of F and B together with the value of alpha In order to solve this problem we require the artist to first generate a trimap A trimap is a set of mattes that divides the image into three regions The first region marks part of the image that is known to be foreground alpha 1 see Figure59 The second defines the part that is known to be background alpha 0 see Figure60 The remaining part of the picture Furnace The Foundry Quick Start 61 Quick Start the unknown region is the area over which we must calculate F Band alpha The tighter these foreground and background mattes can be painted the better and faster the results Figure 8 2 Foreground Figure 8 3 Background The algorithm works by taking pixels from the known fore ground and background regions and trying them at the curre
40. as ease Soe HS BS oe Bard eek ee Se ee Beek 207 Steadiness 208 INICI s esoe ed ee ed One eed AAA DEES BEBO A 208 Quick SEMT vee oe ee a a ee AE ee Rk a ok ds 208 Replacing Camera Shake 6c a See 5 4 6 4 209 Rie fae ee Be dae ee eee ee ee eae de a i a S 209 Pore ia e A GRA AEE A Ee AS EAS A a 209 Wead AE TEE ERE SS REESE EE SSE RESEHEE SG 209 Darin lt a di oe A eRe ee De A Lee we EE ROG 210 ErOpS 64 6 GES 5S ARAS CRORES OR OSEAN RA 211 EXITOS ss as AAA AAA Be ER PRES OEE AAA 211 The Foundry Furnace Xiv Contents Leicester SHUI 22 AA A ra 211 Tile 213 IMPOSTOR ceci ad a ES 213 Quick Start cios ese e na a a A 213 Large textures from small images o o 214 Tee he ERARIO ARA 214 Colour Correction ss 6 44 44 We SSSR EA KEG SE EEE ARA ES 215 ae i Ke a ee me ee A a a ee x 215 Parameters e nic ds as He 8 is HD Ee ee WO 215 WD 6 ie ees ee ee ee ee A eS 216 Exes 2 50 6 at GAR OES EE EAD EGE SSE SERS 216 WireRemoval 217 COMO ne kh we oe HEPES Oe HERE RRS ODER eG He a 217 Gean Pates oct a a ee ERE SEE LEER A ES 217 PUPAL o oce be Ee KS Oe AN EERE OES Ok A 218 Reconstruction Methods 2 644 444069 4448448248444 484 box 218 Rolling Repais 6 645 445 44 aa 219 Curved WIES eeo e dk A AA AA EEA AAA 219 OIE GAME cdo A ES 219 Tracking VOSS oe esac OR de EEE ER SRE SX 220 PMR Se dor re os ee Se a ee ae ee Re a Se ee Bae 221 Parameters o ee e Ge ee dine ee A ORO BE REM EEE amp ee 221 UE
41. both buttons appear so that you can manually perform analyses It s wise to perform temporal alignment first as if the spatial alignment is done first the transform will be wrong for the temporally aligned versions The final modification you can apply to the source clip is to switch on the Match Grade control This regrades the colour histogram of the source clip to better match the reference F Correlate has three inputs The first input Source will be the sequence which is transformed and output during processing The second input Reference is the clip we want to match the Source clip to The third input RefMask can be used to specify the region of the source frame to be used during analysis or alternatively the built in roto tools can be used for this task Not that the mask is there to define what regions of the image should be used not those to be ignored So if we are trying to ignore a foreground character in one of the passes the mask should be black over the foreground character The parameters for this spark are described below Furnace The Foundry Parameters 69 Align Analysis a popup which says how to perform the two differ ent alignments e Both analyse both the spatial and temporal alignments In this case the temporal alignment is performed first e Temporal perform temporal analysis only Find Tem poral Match will be hidden however spatial alignment can be triggered using the Align
42. choose to run the spark again with a different clip without unloading the spark In this case the spark is unaware that the clip has changed Clicking on this button forces the spark to dispose of its internal data tables and recalculate the motion These parameters store the motionderived transform for the image sequence With Analyse checked off only this data will be used It will almost never be useful to edit this data but it may be worth understanding what it represents The parameters are pixel offsets for each of the four corners of the image X1 and X2 are the offsets for the bottom left and the bottom right corners of the image and X3 and X4 are the offsets for the top left and top right corners respectively Together they show a fourcorner warp which can be used to match each frame onto the next frame in the sequence The camera smoothing transform is then derived from this data Furnace The Foundry Examples 211 Crops See Crops on on page 33 Examples The images for the following example can be downloaded from our web site Leicester Square This is a handheld camera shot walking around Leicester Square in London Figure 33 2 Steadiness can be used to quickly smooth out the jerky camera motion Figure 33 2 Leicester Square Download File steadinesslsw tar gz Step by Step 1 Import the LeicesterSquareWalk tif frames and play Note the jerky camera motion 2 Load F_Steadiness into a
43. control modifies the how well adja cent motion lines up in the retime High Smoothness values generate smoother motion but may miss out on small motion details Negative below zero Smoothness values lock on well to small details but may make more mistakes in areas which should have smooth motion Scale this allows the spatial matching to use changes in im age scale when matching Rotate this allows the spatial matching to use image rota tions when matching Translate this allows the spatial matching to use image translations when matching Perspective this allows the spatial matching to use perspec tive transforms when matching Step Size it is rarely necessary to find the optimum trans formation for all pixels and so to speed up the process the image is sampled with a frequency of Step Size and only these pixels are used to find the transformation Decreasing step size will increase both the processing time and the quality of result Filter is used to control the quality of your processed images by reducing the jagged lines characteristic of pixel devices To render high quality images you should switch filtering on With all image processing you have a trade off between quality and time Filtering will increase the quality of your image but will also increase the time it takes to process the image e Normal point sampling can give poor results but is faster to process e High bilinear filtering e E
44. ee 24 TOA ue da ee ek ee a s 24 a 6 5 ak a ES GAMES EES AAS SSeS ERA MERE SAE ERA AES EX 24 ESTE ae HERES EA EAE EE EEE AAA RRA ARA 24 Roto Matte Tool 52 ar ARANA SES SEERA 25 We Roto Tool osea ees RS ERASE AER OH OK 25 Roto Parameters sar CASES EEA ERED SRE CARRE 31 The Foundry Furnace iv Contents E o4 se ON 33 BOK Gk ee ee a KEY ee ee ee R 35 Align 36 aa es A 36 CUICIOSESTO ios i ma e A a A A A A Ai 37 A AAA 37 Parameters lt a EE E A A A da 37 MIA ss amp ERE AS AER AAA 37 ROE MASK A 40 IE e 00 o we AA CER ARE AE A A A ATA 40 GODS o eaaa be RATAS Dee EA ESE Oe Ee es ees 40 Examples o wit a we de e ee e ee Be ee 40 Clean Area Alignment 2 2 ce ee eee ee ee ee eee 40 MatchMoving gt ee RAS EES AAA AAA AR 43 ce AA 44 BlockTexture 47 OUNCE 6 oe ho 4 A EAE SE HAE Ree eS 47 UNE II 47 e oie Ge Ee OS ae EER OE ER SS EY eee Se ee 49 WOES y 2 ek EES AAA EEE ERASE SEA EER EA BEES 50 Parameters e 42 62 a OSES BS SS A HIS THERESE HOS 50 WII cal a a fins ad GS 50 Roto Matte aras AAA A IA A 51 EXAMPIES so a aa Ge A 51 ChannelRepair 52 INICIE oe Bene eee OEE Ee Oe Eee EK HEE Se OE HO Le 52 Quick Start io eek AR ARADO Re RED A a a 53 MIUS 6c a eek hoe A ROR EES OER ES OEE ORE SOS SE ES eres 54 Parameters os iw Bee eh DHE OES ERE EE ODE KRESS ROE OSE BE 54 REP coins ra 54 Roto Matte oo ek LAR AAA RR AA RR ARA 55 Furnace The Foundry Contents ColourAlign Introduction 0 0
45. frame That way we only change the pixels that need to be changed The Foundry Furnace 152 MOTIONSMOOTH MotionSmooth Introduction Quick Start Inputs Parameters Smooth This chapter looks at smoothing out boiling on clips using Furnace s spark F MotionSmooth For hints tips tricks and feedback please visit http support thefoundry co uk This spark uses motion estimation to rebuild all frames in a clip For each frame of the clip it aligns the frame before and frame after onto the current frame and then combines these three frames using a three way median filter This process is very good at cleaning up temporal artefacts in a sequence For example it reduces noise and film grain and if a prior algo rithm has introduced temporal discontinuities such as flicker or boiling of parts of the image these will be substantially reduced Load the MotionSmooth spark Click on a clip as all three inputs Render This quality of the motion estimation can be tuned using all the standard Kronos techniques See Kronos on page on page 122 F_MotionSmooth has three inputs The parameters for this spark are described below Vector Detail defines the amount of detail in the motion vectors The maximum value of 100 will generate one vector per pixel This will produce the most accurate vectors but will take longer to render Global Smoothness sets the smoothness of the vectors for the coarse motion Loc
46. frame in the Reference clip we want to match to When the reference method is set to Frame Relative this control stores the offset from the current frame number where we index into the Reference clip In this last case for example if we are currently on frame 20 and the Relative Frame is 5 then we will be matching frame 20 to frame 15 Incremental this button only appears when Match is set to Ref To Ref i e we are calculating all motion from one clip For example if we try to match frame 20 to frame 1 of the same clip we have a choice of calculating the motion in one hit Incremental off or by calculating the motion as the sum of all of the individual motion transforms from frame 20 all the way back to frame 1 Incremental switched on The latter Incremental on is more likely to lockon even for extreme motions over long frame ranges The former Incre mental switched off is more likely to give a pixelperfect match between the frames if one exists Clear Motion Cache when using this Spark on the Discreet Desktop you may choose to run the Spark again with a differ ent clip without unloading the Spark In this case the Spark is unaware that the clip has changed Clicking on this but ton forces the Spark to dispose of its internal data tables and recalculate the motion Scale switch this onto correct for scale changes in the trans formation Rotate switch this on to correct for rotational changes in the transfor
47. horizontal 0 Once the blur type and size has been correctly set up try increasing Iterations to 80 This should increase the amount of blur removed If the image is particularly noisy or grainy try increasing Noise Estimate There are two fundamental problems with all deconvolution al gorithms amplification of noise and ringing on edges In F_DeBlur both are controlled to an extent by Regularisa tion which regulates the correction applied in each iteration in flat areas of the image To deal with the latter the general approach is to apply bounds to the image after each itera tion which limit the amount the image can be changed by the F DeBlur algorithm Whether to apply the bounds is deter mined by Threshold and the magnitude range of the bounds is determined by Beta In plain areas where no large varia tion in the image is expected the algorithm applies stronger bounds to suppress ringing Decreasing Beta will mean more stringent bounds are applied which may have the adverse ef fect of flattening textures Increasing Threshold will apply the bounds more often which will result in less ringing but not as much blur being removed Try tuning Beta and Threshold to improve the quality of the result F DeBlur has two inputs the sequence to be deblurred and another called Blur By setting Output to Blurred the sequence on the blur input will be blurred using the filter calculated by the deblur algorithm This can be useful for ex
48. in a sequence and optionally replace them with a repair This technique can be used to remove fixed markers or to track new detail into a sequence The tool has advantages over standard trackers when conventional tracking points are of poor quality F_PlanarPatcher tracks pixel data in entire regions rather than relying upon the presence of a small number of continually visible fixed points The plug in requires the user to mark the region of the image that should be used for tracking This marker is usually a roto The marker is arranged to include the surface to be tracked and possibly shaped to exclude other items from the track Use the source sequence to the Source input a tracking matte identify the surface to be tracked you can use a roto for this if you wish the repair and a matte to denote where the repair image is valid so that we can do the comp of the repair onto the source for you If you chose to use the roto and Auto Key Frame Roto is on the roto will be warped accoring to the transform calculated so that the tracking region you selected at frame 1 will be propogated through the sequence If the track starts to run in the wrong direction you can turn Auto Key Frame Roto off and hand animate the roto in the right direction to give the spark a hint Turning Auto Key Frame Roto off will delete all of the keys that have been written apart from that at the repair frame This is because we assume the track has gone wrong if
49. infor mation from the current frame to make the repair Turning on Use Reference allows information from earlier in the sequence or from an optionally supplied clean plate to be motion inter polated to repair the damaged region Where this not available the algorithm automatically switches back to the spatial only algorithm Blend The first spatial repair algorithm Blend tries to match the statistics of the reference channel to the undamaged area of the damaged channel It then simply blends the matched pixels of the reference channel to fix the damage The second algo rithm Rematch is more complex and attempts to adjust the local statistics of the proposed Blend repair to those in the undamaged area It is entirely dependent on the footage as to which algorithm gives the best result Furnace The Foundry Quick Start 53 Quick Start wns A ARO Yay Figure 6 2 Undamaged green channel It is possible to tune the Rematch algorithm to improve the repair quality F_ChannelRepair uses a block based approach to model the damage in the image The clean and damaged channels are split into multiple blocks of size Block Size We then try and modify the local statistics of the damaged block to make it equal to the local statistics of the clean block In practice if there is motion in the sequence the pixels in the two blocks will not be the same which will result in incorrect estimation of the local statistics T
50. ing the Set Single Frame Bad button to specifiy that a single frame needs to be repaired The algorithm looks up to 20 frames in front and behind If there are no frames marked as valid in that range then a warn ing message is displayed on the screen as shown in Figure 22 3 This message tells you that we ve not been able to repair this frame The Foundry Furnace 148 MOTIONREPAIR Figure 22 2 Animation curve for Valid Frame showing 2 dips that define the frames to be repaired You should check that you have set keys for the Valid Frame parameter that defines the good and bad frames The repair can be tuned much in the same way as frames generated when retiming clips with Kronos as many of the parameters are the same If only part of a frame is damaged you can use a matte to restrict the extent of the repair This can be the second input or a drawn roto from within the spark Figure 22 3 Warning message rendered to the screen Quick Start Switch AutoKey on Furnace The Foundry Inputs 149 Inputs Parameters Repair Find the damaged frame N Simply click the Set Single Frame Bad button Now process All output frames are the same as the input frame apart from frame N which is being reconstructed from the frames either side F_MotionRepair requires two inputs the clip containing dam aged frames and an optional matte to define the area to be repaired The parameters for this plug i
51. is gid dead aod aed a SO Hk a ee da 148 II a eke Vee E Bk ee ad ee ee Se Be a ee S 149 Parametrs 3 ek ee ARERR AAA EEL EA HE RE ESS 149 Kepa ARI ee OS He oe bere ee ee ee ees 149 RO MARES fo ee ii ee See SM a oe rd 150 COONS osaan RARER REE OX REESE CASES REDE AR 150 Examples co sia aie ar dik a te oy Gade Gye a aie Gee aie Hels 151 Carnaby A Ee EE EES OS eG IESE EH SSS 151 MotionSmooth 152 EOS sica AEE EH EES OR EER EA RAE EY REDES ADA 152 UM RN 152 IS a A EA CARR oS eS ESE ee OS 152 Parameters 46 ee kk A SERA ER EEE AAA AA a 152 SOON econ 152 PixelTexture 155 Imtroducthion 6 6 44 des EWES OOM ARS SHES EEE ES SHAS 155 UIC SERIE ss es he a RAE SE ROA OES A a 156 Creating TEN S oo vs ce eee dara 156 Repairing Images o ee es 157 Biasing the Result sso asea EEG RRA RES SESE ARA 158 IS ho ce ok we ee op ee ee wh rd i n ee e 159 Parameters o ooe ER eS RAGES ADEE AAS AS AAA Y 159 TEXTE c 65 6 54 4S EE SSS EES ERAS CESARE ASSES ES 159 RON PG 3 ee ee dE ee ARA So ee 161 TONS 6 4 84 S A AA CHAR ORS AD ERS OEE OO 161 Bees Dz sl IE RES EEE Oe EAS OOH PEE OES 161 Furnace The Foundry Contents xi PlanarPatcher 162 Introduction AI II 162 Quick BRAKE s soans a We hoe a 162 IES 6 how PA Oe RA SR KES ADS 163 Pores gt ie a SA A RARE AERA AEE AS Y 163 PARES 24h ioe oD AEE AS EY RAS HE AER EK Eee 163 Roto Mask ic ob Boe eS BOY kD a a OS RES OS 164 Repair MARTE III 164 CENTES o oen a a O E a
52. is to produce a rough matte for the effect It will either process the matte input clip or create and process a roto in place of that clip No matter if you are using the roto or the clip you can process the resulting image with a variety of tools For your effect you can choose to use nothing the matte clip or the roto The controls and tools that are displayed depend on which of these you select The roto tool is quite straight forward to use There are several parts to the tool interface e the roto outline control points and tangents See Fig ure 3 3 on the next page The Foundry Furnace 26 COMMON CONTROLS e the roto axis controlling its translation red cross hairs rotation green arrow and scale blue box See Figure 3 3 Figure 3 3 Roto Shape e the roto animation timeline and keyframes See Figure 3 4 Figure 3 4 Roto Timeline e the buttons on the Roto Matte control page to manipu late the roto Creating a new roto To create a new roto you simply draw the shape you want by pressing down and dragging the pen A green line will trace your pen path Once you release the pen a roto will be created that has the minimum number of control points that accurately matches the shape you drew If you want a simple shape to start with choose one from the Shape popup See Figures 3 5 and 3 6 Furnace The Foundry Roto Matte Tool 27 Figure 3 5 Square Roto Figure 3 6 Circular R
53. just a few tracking points In Figure 30 1 the left image shows a camera move across and down the building Liberty on Carnaby Street in London The sequence is about 60 frames long with just 4 images shown here The image on the right is the plate that was constructed using F_SmartPlate Figure 30 1 F_SmartPlate If there are foreground elements in the sequence with differ ent motion to the background these will appear blurred across the output plate Alternatively the input frames can be com bined using a median filter which has the effect of removing all moving foreground elements entirely from the image making it ideal for the generation of clean plates In Figure 30 2 on the facing page we show 3 images from a 170 frame clip following a woman walking down Carnaby Street F SmartPlate is used to build a larger plate and with the median filter switched on the moving foreground objects Furnace The Foundry Introduction 191 Figure 30 2 Sweeping camera move following a person walk ing down Carnaby Street Figure 30 3 Output of F_SmartPlate The Foundry Furnace 192 SMARTPLATE including the woman are removed as shown in Figure 30 3 on the previous page Smart plate will usually need a video resolution clip input to build a film resolution single frame output Because in Flame the input and output clips have to be the same size it is necessary to first resize the clip to the size of the large p
54. of the matte input e Inverted Luminance inverted luminance of the matte input Furnace The Foundry Parameters 127 Build From One Image switch this on to build the final out put from the closest single frame as opposed to the closest two frames This will result in a sharper image but more jerky motion Show Vectors switch this on to display the motion vectors over the image A motion vector is the estimated direction a pixel will move between two frames say frame 1 and frame 2 Motion vectors are used to build frames between frame 1 and 2 A forward motion vector is the estimated direction a pixel moves when going from frame 1 to frame 2 and is shown in red whereas a backwards vector estimates the direction from frame 2 to frame 1 and is shown in blue Vectors have both magnitude and a direction These vectors cannot be edited Correct Luminance corrects for luminance changes in the sequence before calculating the vectors and should result in more accurate vectors on sequences with large luminance vari ations Error Threshold sets the pixel difference beneath which mo tion is ignored For example if the image was very grainy the algorithm might try and estimate the motion of the grain be tween frames Increasing Error Threshold would stop this Block Size adjusts the size of the data blocks used to calcu late the vectors Varying the Block Size will cause the motion estimation to lock on to different p
55. of the wire in pixels Start Colour the colour of the cross hairs marking the start of the wire Import Track click on this button to import tracking data that has been previously exported from Stabilizer Note that you should export the Track X and Track Y data for use here and not the Shift X and Shift Y data Stop X the horizontal position of the end of the wire in pix els Stop Y the vertical position of the end of the wire in pixels The Foundry Furnace 224 WIREREMOVAL Examples Clouds Stop Colour the colour of the cross hairs marking the end of the wire Centre X Y the percentage position of the centre point For example with Centre X 50 the centre point will be exactly halfway between the end points Centre Y shows the fractional move of the centre point off the centre line between the end points Wire Colour the colour of the onscreen wire tool All the images for the following examples can be downloaded from our web site These timelapse clouds over a row of terraced houses would gt Figure 35 6 Clouds over houses be tricky to clean plate unless an entirely separate sequence of clouds were available This shot would otherwise have to be painted however Furnace does a good repair on this using the simple or gradient reconstruction methods Download File wiresclouds tar gz Furnace The Foundry Examples 225 Sarah Step by Step 1 Import cloud
56. press either the Set Speed Curve or the Set Frame Curve depending on whether you re a speed or frame person Original Clip Length the input clip length in frames Output Clip Length the number of frames you want to render Set Speed Curve sets a speed based on the input and output clip lengths Set Frame Curve sets a frame curve based on the input and output clip lengths All the images for the following examples can be downloaded from our web site This example Figure 17 9 shows a taxi driving past our offices in Soho We ll retime this sequence to speed up the taxi at the start and slow down at the end Download File kronostaxi tar gz The Foundry Furnace 130 KRONOS Figure 17 9 Taxi Step by Step Import taxi tif Play the taxi clip to get a sense of the motion Load the F Kronos spark Click on the spark button then the taxi on the reels By default the clip will be slowed down to half speed However we wish to have a fast start and slow end Switch Timing to Frame and at frame 1 in the timeline set a Frame key to be 1 and at frame 100 set a Frame key to 50 By default this gives us a slowin and slowout as shown in Figure 17 10 Now to get that fast start adjust the tangent of the first keyframe to get the curve shown in Figure 17 11 Figure 17 10 Slow in slow Figure 17 11 Fast in slow out 5 To get a sense of the motion you can set the mode to blend rende
57. repaired using pixels from the previ ous repaired frame This approach may not always work For example if the background we copy from the previous frame is different to the current frame either because the overall luminance has changed or the amount of motion blur on the background has changed then the repair will look poor Rolling repairs rely on the previous repaired frame being available Thus if you split your rendering across multiple machines on a network this repaired frame will not be available to use You should always render rolling repairs on the same machine See Network Rendering on page 19 The spark assumes that wires are curved By default each wire has three points to define the start middle and end To get you started let s consider a simple wire removal and describe what you need to do Apply F_WireRemoval to a clip that needs wires removed and select a destination reel for the output Press Reset All An onscreen wire icon will be shown centered on the image It s easier to position the ends of the onscreen wire tool if you re The Foundry Furnace 220 WIREREMOVAL Tracking Wires Figure 35 2 Curved Wire Tool looking at the Source image so press F1 and move one of the end crosses to the start of the wire and the other to the end of the wire It doesn t matter which way round they go You may need to move the centre cross if the wire is curved Switch off the onscreen wire tool by selec
58. sampled for texture A larger source region will mean less noticeable repetitiveness in the new texture Adjust Block Size to find a suitable sized building block to generate the new texture Overlap determines the amount adjacent blocks are overlap A greater overlap gives a better chance of hiding the edge join If the edges are still visible increasing Blend Size will blur the join but too much blurring will result in a noticeable soft edge to the blocks Increasing Number of Samples will increase the quality of the fit between blocks but at the expense of processing time The whole pro cess is seeded by a random number so changing the Seed will Furnace The Foundry Quick Start 49 Crowds Note give you alternative texture fills some of which may be more pleasing than others If you are using a matte to specify the region to be filled Path Width specifies the quality of the join between the texture region and the source image Similarly Edge Blend specifies the extent to which this join is blurred If there is luminance change across the region being filled and switching on Luminance Match will attempt to align the luminance between the new region and original image Luminance Blur controls the extent of this matching process Finally if you are attempting to generate temporal textures switch on Temporal Consistency before rendering an output sequence This will ensure the new texture is generated in a consistent m
59. take either repaired or undam aged pixels from the previous corrected frame in the sequence Where the correct undamaged pixels do not exist in the previ ous frame a Spatial algorithm is automatically used To remove nonvertical scratches rotate the image to make the scratches vertical before applying F_ScratchRepair then rotate back afterwards Quick Start Connect the clip with the scratch to the input of F ScratchRepair Position the vertical scratch tool over the scratch Adjust the Scratch Width if required The scratch should disappear If artefacts still exist try adjusting Points If an edge passes obliquely across the damaged region it may be necessary to increase Gradient Factor To remove the scratch on subsequent frames it is necessary to ensure the scratch tool continues to be positioned over the scratch If the scratch moves from frame to frame use Discreet s built in tracker to track the position of the scratch and apply this to the Position parameter using the animation sheet For a better quality repair try turning on Motion Rather than using pixels from the current frame this will use motion es timation to find pixels in the previous corrected frame and matchmove them into place Inputs F_ScratchRepair has one input the source containing the scratch Parameters The parameters for this plug in are described below Furnace The Foundry Parameters 183 Repair Position sets the horizontal po
60. the edge that has been found by the algorithm Edge Colour sets the colour of the edge on the screen Furnace The Foundry Parameters 117 Edge Freedom after drawing the input roto the algorithm tries to find the edge between each pair of control vertices But it is not allowed to wander too far from a straight line drawn between them Increasing the edge freedom lets this line wander more at the risk of letting it snap to another nearby edge Decreasing it will pull it back Figure 16 6 shows that this has been set too tight so that it misses the edge we re trying to follow Figure 16 7 gets it right Figure 16 6 Edge Freedom Figure 16 7 Edge Freedom 10 50 Snap Colour the colour of the pixels that specify the actual start and end points of the edge This is essentially the input roto points plus the Snap to Range Snap To Range controls how much you want the edge to go through the input roto points If you set this to zero as shown in Figure 16 9 then the edge will be drawn through the vertex even though it should be allowed to wander off and fine the correct edge as shown in Figure 16 8 where the snap to range is 5 pixels Figure 16 8 Snap to Range Figure 16 9 Snap toRange 5 0 Edge Roto Show Edge Roto switch this on to show the output edge roto The Foundry Furnace 118 EDGEMATTE Edge Roto Colour sets the colour of the edge roto on the screen Segments specifies the number of
61. the images Rather than using a con ventional alpha matte it works by overlapping the two images and calculating optimum position for the edge that best hides the join F_Splicer is best at joining together images that contain a lot of texture but can work well in other scenarios The plug in is designed for joining together still images for ex ample to create clean plates When it is applied to a sequence it will generate a new optimum join for each frame These are likely to be in different positions on each frame resulting in a highly visible moving edge To avoid this it is possible to enforce temporal consistency but this is only likely to work on sequences with little motion Note F Splicer doesn t attempt to do any automatic image alignment It simply joins a pair of images that have been positioned by the artist and attempts to hide the join For automated image alignment try the F SmartPlate F Align or F_Steadiness plug ins Also F_Splicer is also likely to give very different results at proxy resolutions so it s best not to use it with proxies Select the two images to be composited together the two in puts and a matte of which part of the image you wish to splice If you don t have a matte select any image and then set the Roto Matte parameter to Roto and draw your matte Connect a matte to the third input that specifies which part of the sec ond source you require compositing over the first Splicer will now tr
62. ther details Furnace The Foundry 21 Basics What is a Spark Where are the Sparks Loading Sparks This section will tell you some basic information about sparks Skip this if you are familiar with Discreet A spark is a small computer program that can be loaded onto your Discreet system to do a specific task Other manufac turers call them plug ins Once loaded a spark behaves as an integral part of your Discreet system and appears in the Effects menu just like the built in effects The sparks buttons are in the Effects menu on most Discreet systems You can have up to five sparks loaded at any one time The name of the currently loaded spark is shown on the spark button In the Figure 2 1 the Tinder sparks T_Distorto T_Dilate T_LensFlare T_BlurMasked T RomanMosaic have been loaded If a button does not have a spark loaded it will display the word Spark on the button Effects Menu Figure 2 1 Flame user interface showing Sparks buttons To load a spark either click on the button if it says Spark or hold down the Alt key and click on any spark button if it already has a spark loaded This will display the sparks browser Select the Furnace spark you want to load from the directory usr discreet sparks The Foundry Furnace 22 BASICS Using Sparks Command and Module Modes Figure 2 2 Sparks browser Using a spark is not much different from using one of Discreet s own effec
63. vertical position of the start point Import Track imports tracking data to the X Roto Start and Y Roto Start parameters Roto Colour the colour of the roto Create Key creates a keyframe at the current frame Delete Key deletes the key frame on the current frame Create All Keys create a keyframe at an interval of Skip Frames frames Delete All Keys deletes all key frames in the sequence Skip Frames how many frames to skip if you process through the sequence as it s unlikely you ll want a roto key at every frame Export Roto Raw allows you to save the output edge roto in RAW format This can then be imported into Discreet s keyer The file gets saved to usr discreet lt discreetversion gt path by default Import Track click on this button to import tracking data that has been previously exported from Stabilizer for use as the X Y Roto Start point Note that you should export the Track X and Track Y data for use here and not the Shift X and Shift Y data Examples BelleWalking In this example we will use F_MatteToRoto to create a roto from an inaccurate matte Step by Step 1 Fileln BelleMatte 1 20 jpg and view the matte in the alpha channel Attach F_MatteToRoto 2 Position the on screen position widget as in Figure 19 1 on the facing page You can see from this image that the red outline for the upper threshold is OK however the blue one for the edge vertices is poor Furnace The Foundry
64. wire It is the fastest method and works well when the wire is over backgrounds like sky clouds or smoke e Gradient this method uses a slope dependent filter that interpolates across the wire at the most likely angle given the image behind the wire Inpainting this method uses a texturelike repair to replace the wire with other likely pixels from nearby in the image Temporal Inpainting the same as above but selects pixels from the previous and next frames as well as the current This is only useful if the wire or camera are moving as extra sample data will be visible in either the previous or next frames Thickness sets the width of the wire The region repaired is the width of the wire by the length of the wire defined by the start and end positions The thickness should be set as small as possible This value can be animated Detail Length is a trade off between the amount of grain re moved and the blurring of image along the direction of the wire If the wire you are trying to remove has detail within it for ex ample a steel wire in which the twisted threads are reflecting light then the algorithm may leave these alone thinking that they are grain Figure 35 3 In this situation you should de crease the detail length A value of zero will definitely remove the artifacts but also the grain which would have to be put back using Furnace ReGrain Alternatively you can try the inpainting reconstruction method which woul
65. woman in the centre of the screen as she walks from left to right down the street At this frame a man walks in the opposite direction and her feet and his head overlap Figure 27 6 Figure 27 7 Figure 27 6 shows the normal matte for the woman and Fig ure 27 7 shows the result of using this in RigRemoval Note that the man s head interferes with the repair and the recon struction of the pavement is particularly bad probably due to the man becoming the dominant motion source as the people occlude To fix this we can adapt the matte to include a mid grey area over the man that tells the rig removal algorithm to ignore this in the repair This matte is show in Figure 27 8 The Foundry Furnace 176 RIGREMOVAL Inputs Parameters Rig and the result is shown in Figure 27 9 Note that the repair on the pavement is improved and the man is simply clipped rather than being used in the repair Figure 27 8 Figure 27 9 F_RigRemoval has two inputs a clip and an optional matte The matte should define the area of the clip that should be replaced with pixels from elsewhere in the sequence White parts of the matte will be replaced Black pixels will be ignored The parameters for this spark are described below Look Ahead Frames sets the number of frames the algorithm should look forwards and backwards in the sequence to find the missing pixel data A value of 5 will analyse 10 frames in total 5 forward and 5 back
66. you use this control therefore the key frames will also be wrong If you edit the roto whilst Auto Key Frame Roto is set to true those edits will be ignored as the roto points will be calculated internally and overwritten If you need to edit the roto i e the track is incorrect turn this control to false Furnace The Foundry Inputs 163 Inputs Parameters Patcher F PlanarPatcher has 4 inputs Source is the source sequence that contains the region to be replaced TrackingMask is a matte specifying the part of the image that should be used for tracking if the internal RotoShape is not used Repair is the repair frame and Repair Matte is a matte to show where the repair is valid Repair Frame the position in the input sequence of the re pair clip Scale switch this on to correct for scale changes to the re paired region Rotate switch this on to correct for rotational changes to the repaired region Translate switch this on to correct for translational changes to the repaired region Perspective switch this on to correct for small perspective changes to the repaired region Filtering sets the filtering quality e Normal low quality but quick to render e High uses a bilinear filter This gives good results and is quicker to render than high filtering e Extreme uses a sinc filter to interpolate pixels giving a sharper repair This gives the best results but takes longer to proc
67. 0 08005 Data D t dee e bond eee o Crops Comp wie ee BS Sy Bw Examples se 2 dur Cie Hee Bala ee The Foundry Furnace vi Contents DeBlur 76 Introduction o o 4 3 de OR SSeS III 76 Quick SEart s soana a We hoe DE we hae a 76 WUE ee Ge we SA Se AES EGOS SSS a GS 77 ParamMmEEGS 6 44 a AAA FEO ERE ARE A 77 DEI a RA da 78 Examples lt lt sia AAA A a RCA RA 79 Es o AAA 79 FE eh ih ee a ee a ce E 81 DeFlicker 84 IEE hk dee we A AAA AAA 84 Quick Start ios eG a ERG Dew he ee eee A a s 84 TIM N se 44 bee REM EW GAY ES AO HASSE OSS 85 Copying AA 86 WN ss a ee Oe a A A eS 86 Re eo a as a ee ee a a ee ee R a E 86 POSER E gt lt 1 deseada ee ae ANA AAA AA 86 o A E E ee a ae eee 86 Examples s e 0 de ve Bie wa ee we ee dl Bi ed de ee MO ron de we e i 88 Hedge esa ee BA Be ke de a AAS 88 BUS bea dk we ee OE EEK EO HK SEEDPEER GEES we DEE oS EE A 89 BIKE nk oe eS a ERE ER CERES OLE a 90 DeGrain 92 ORONO 6 ee saa a SERS ye EEE EES SSE EA ESS 92 Quick SEMT sk ee doe e ewe Se ee Re ee les 92 Working Interactively 4 kw hk OSS HEM EBRD DEPS SS HR RE 93 SAA Tuning e Fh o e Ee oh a ee ee Se 94 Temporal ONE s lt se oe BEY ee eee a SES De ww A 94 IN ia he a eye E a ek de eo dea 94 Parameters oo ke Oe e eR Ow ee eee ORE e HEE Re wer 3 94 DEUDA 52 4 o ARE EASE OOS REE R ASSES ARA a 95 Furnace The Foundry Contents vii PUGS eS SABES SONS SSS ESS AA 96 Roto Matte a 2 OE EOS EOS EES EES SRS OSS 96 Examples
68. 6 Repair Channel 54 Repair Frame 163 Reset Response 172 Reset Spatial 7 1 Resize 201 Response Mix 172 Right 34 Rig Region 178 Rolling 143 Rolling Repair 223 Rotate 38 57 71 163 194 210 Rotation 33 Roto Matte 88 119 Roto Colour 116 136 Safety Factor 111 Sample Bottom 35 50 160 171 Sample Left 35 50 160 171 Sample Right 35 50 160 171 Sample Source 50 Sample Texture 1 50 Sample Texture 2 50 Sample Top 35 50 160 171 Scale 33 38 57 71 163 171 194 202 210 Scale B 171 Scale G 171 Scale R 171 Scale Transform 39 Scale X 33 Scale Y 33 Scratch Width 183 Search Range 70 Seed 51 161 Segments 118 Set 129 Set Default Timing 70 Set Single Frame Bad 149 Shape 32 179 Show 69 86 128 170 178 179 183 223 Show Edge 116 Show Edge Roto 117 Show Grain 96 Show Motion Map 96 Show Reference 39 Show Roto 116 Show Roto Matte 32 Show Vectors 127 149 153 Shutter Samples 127 139 Shutter Time 127 139 Sinc Filter 222 Skip Frames 136 Slip Reference 39 Slip Source 39 Smaller Segments 161 Smoothing 126 Smoothing Iterations 149 153 Smoothness 54 71 87 Smooth Output 104 Snap Colour 117 Snap Roto to Edge 116 Snap To Range 117 Softness 31 179 202 Source Frame 70 88 Source Length 70 Speed 125 Start Colour 223 Start X 223 Start X Y Point 197 Start Y 223 Step Size 39 57 71
69. 6 shows an arctic fox walking across a pebble beach In this example we wish to remove the fox and replace it with generated pebble texture sampled from elsewhere in the image The second input should be the texture you want to sample from so we ll use the same fox picture The third input is the matte used in the composite of the generated texture over the first input Figure 24 7 shows a rough matte of the fox The fourth input is a bias matte which we don t need in this example so select the fox matte or any picture Select a destination reel On entering Figure 24 6 Fox highlighted Figure 24 7 Matte of the fox used as the first and second used as the third and fourth inputs inputs the spark press Reset All View the Texture input and position the red box over the pebbles you want to sample from Switch Fill Matte on and View the Result Figure 24 8 Figure 24 8 Fox removed with F_PixelTexture Here s another example removing the barn in Figure 24 9 with The Foundry Furnace 158 PIXELTEXTURE Biasing the Result tree texture sampled from the same image A matte is supplied for the composite Figure 24 10 Figure 24 9 Original Image Figure 24 10 Matte of Barn The result is shown in Figure 24 11 Figure 24 11 Repaired Image You can influence the shape of the generated texture using a bias image This is most easily explained with pictures Figure 24 3 on page 156 shows a small input text
70. 8 May 2007 Requirements Flame Flint Fire Inferno or Smoke Flame 8 5 on Irix32 Flame 9 5 on Irix64 Flint 9 0 9 5 2007 on Linux32 Flame 9 5 2007 on Linux64 and Burn 2 0 2007 have been tested Foundry FLEXIm Tools FFT 4 0v8 or later for floating license support New Features There are no new features The Foundry Furnace 232 APPENDIX A Furnace 3 0v3 Improvements There are no improvements to existing features Fixed Bug 1 Batch BUG ID 691 more stability problems fixed that can cause crashes in batch on Irix Known Bugs amp Workarounds 1 Although this version is better than 3 0v3 some inter mittent stability issues remain in Batch As a workaround use the plug ins in Desktop mode 2 F_Kronos BUG ID 609 when applied ith timing method set to speed and speed set to 100 results in an offset of 1 frame between input and output As a aworkaround apply with method set to frame and keyframe 1 on the first frame and the final frame on the final frame 3 F_WireRemoval BUG ID 451 shearing on the repair is visible on shallow wires that go off screen bottom or left but only if the sinc filtering is switched on This is a maintenance release of Furnace on Discreet Release Date 22 December 2006 Requirements Flame Flint Fire Inferno or Smoke Flame 8 5 on Irix32 Flame 9 5 on Irix64 Flint 9 0 9 5 2007 on Linux32 Flame 9 5 2007 on Linux64 and Burn 2 0 2007 have been tested
71. Custom select this if the above aggression levels do not give the required result and then adjust the dirtDetection and ComplexMotionDetection parameters Output as well as the repaired image it is possible to output a number of diagnostic images which are useful for tuning the parameters Show Repaired Dirt the repaired output image with the Final Dirt shown as red by default pixels Repair the repaired output image using the Final Dirt matte Final Dirt for each piece of dirt in Dilated Dirt we attempt to make a repair If this repair is very similar to the source image within a tolerance defined by Change Threshold we assume the dirt was incorrectly detected and discard it from the matte and repair This modified matte is the Final Dirt Red pixels indicate the dirt is in the complex motion region and therefore more likely to be unreliable White pixels indicate dirt detected outside the complex motion region Dilated Dirt dilated Combined Dirt image used to make the repair Combined Dirt a combination of the two methods ac cording to the complex motion region Inside the complex motion region it is the dirt detected by both the motion and spatial based detectors Outside the complex motion region it is just the dirt detected by the motion detector Spatial Dirt the dirt detected using a spatial median based filter Motion Dirt the dirt detected using a motion based detection algorithm Complex Motion Re
72. Diffuse chooses pixels for the foreground and back ground by diffusing the colours in from the known fore ground and background regions into the unknown re gion This results in much smoother more consistent foreground and background colour guesses e Similar forces a foreground colour to be chosen that is similar to the combined colour C e Any chooses a pixel at random from the nearby fore ground region for the unknown foreground colour and a pixel and random from the nearby background region for the unknown background colour Refine by having chosen an initial guess for the foreground and background colours there are two possible refinement methods Error Minimising is more suitable for more complex rapidly changing alphas and Detail Matching is better suited to smoother alphas e Error Minimising takes the initial values for F and B and solves the compositing equation for alpha An iter ative process of refinement follows whereby the colours are modified in an attempt to get a better fit to the com positing equation whilst ensuring the foreground back ground and alpha remain consistent and edges in the alpha correspond to edges in the original image e Detail Matching takes the initial values for F and B and forces then to fit a system of equations that com bines knowledge of both the compositing equation and structure in the image Refinement the number of refinement iterations that take place The greater t
73. Foundry directs in writing destroy all such copies In the later case if requested by The Foundry Licensee shall provide The Foundry with a certificate signed by an officer of Licensee confirming that the foregoing destruction has been completed Licensee agrees that the Software and Documentation are pro prietary and confidential information of The Foundry and that all such information and any communications relating thereto collectively Confidential Information are confidential and a fundamental and important trade secret of The Foundry Furnace The Foundry End User License Agreement 249 SECTION 13 INSPECTION SECTION 14 NONSOLICITATION Licensee shall disclose Confidential Information only to Li censee s employees who are working on an Authorized Project and have a need to know such Confidential Information and shall advise any recipients of Confidential Information that it is to be used only as authorized in this Agreement Licensee shall not disclose Confidential Information or otherwise make any Confidential Information available to any other of Licensee s employees or to any third parties without the express written consent of The Foundry Licensee agrees to segregate to the extent it can be reasonably done the Confidential Information from the confidential information and materials of others in order to prevent commingling Licensee shall take reasonable security measures which such measure
74. Haloes if Edges is set to Halo In Out any soft ness applied works on the side being grown Show Roto Matte this toggles the rendered output to be either the processed roto matte or the result of the effect Use this to display the Roto Matte whilst you are tweaking it for your effect Colour sets the colour of the roto overlay in case the default black colour is difficult to see against your image MatteOnly Controls Clip Min if processing the matte input clip this sets the black level of the matte Clip Max if processing the matte input clip this sets the white level of the matte RotoOnly Controls Shape sets the initial shape of the roto When you select this the current roto will be destroyed e Circle creates a circular roto shape See Figure 3 6 on page 27 e Square creates a square roto shape See Figure 3 5 on page 27 e Freehand select this to draw an irregular shape You should click and drag onscreen to draw out the shape rather than click repeatedly to define control points for the spline See 3 3 on page 26 Bezier Roto switch this on for a smooth Bezier curve be tween the control points Figure 3 12 on the facing page or switch it off for a polygon Figure 3 13 on the next page Tran X sets the horizontal position of the roto shape Change this to move the shape right and left This is linked to the on screen red cross hair Furnace The Foundry Crops 33 Crops
75. R orador PERERA EES EEE AAA SE eS 123 Fine Tuning ea a RA aE RR AA E 123 Separating Foreground and Background Motions 124 DU a AA a ee OG ee a ee 124 NOR eka eae a ee ee hae ae OR Oe ae oa 124 Motion BIOT oF ae EG E a E ES A 125 PUTS o a ee ve Boe a ee we a eE Be we ee es ae e we ee 125 PAM eos ck Oe RR BA ek ee oe Ke Se a E ee 125 PIONS 4 5 4 ww Hee OE EEK OHA EERE GEES we DED od COM e 125 GOPS soree br BS ee o Ee ee ee ee ee ee 129 LOO oe ee hd Boe Saye eRe ee Behe d oH oe ORE HH a 129 Examples gt hoa eA ESSE AAA OEE AS ESR A 129 ARCA gt var as e Bee ae ee oe He 8 129 Taxi Motion Bluf lt so 6 eo 4S ESA ERE SEA EEE EEE 64H RES 131 Kronos Algorithm o seret 44 pee sede 54945 4524 54 WES 131 MatchGrade 132 WRC sa he ek oe EE A A A OE Ee SEES 132 Duick A 132 OR ua a Se AA AAA AAA EE OSE A 133 Furnace The Foundry Contents Examples coi aie a oe sean tia ete a BelleWalking MotionBlur Introduction lt o ee eh ARES eH Quick SEAE cocos ee a a E ee MUS o oe te ee eed eh ete ee ds bd Parameters 6 44 ikea bok d wwe hw wed EXAMPI S os eee ake ea OR he Ew a BelleWalking MotionMatte Introduction o Quick Start o AI The Foundry Furnace x Contents MotionRepair 147 Introduction os ceea ea aa SG we eee wee SK EH RES Oe EE a 147 Warning Messages te eee ee es 147 OIEA
76. See Figure 3 1 and Figure 3 2 on page 25 This controls the rendering of proxy images shows tool tips and onscreen tools The display tools options are listed here 1 00 Home Pan Guide Current Multi Select Display Tool ed No ess Penup tees Figure 3 1 Display Tools e Quarter Proxy Widget renders a quarter of the image resolution scaled to fit the screen and displays the on screen tools and buttons Half Proxy Widget renders half the image resolution scaled to fit the screen and displays the onscreen tools and buttons e Full Image Widget renders the full image resolution and displays onscreen tools and buttons e Quarter Proxy renders a quarter of the image resolu tion scaled to fit the screen without onscreen tools and buttons The Foundry Furnace 24 COMMON CONTROLS e Half Proxy renders half the image resolution scaled to fit the screen without onscreen tools and buttons e Full Image renders the full image resolution without on screen tools and buttons Help Press the Help button to display a brief overview of the cur rently loaded Furnace spark The help page also shows the version of the Furnace spark To hide the help page press the Help button again See Figure 3 2 on the facing page Tooltips Switch this on to display information about the currently se lected parameter See Figure 3 2 on the next page Process Controls when to process the effect The default settin
77. Software Manager inst f Furnace3 1v1 Spark4 0 irix mips release 32 tardist Inst gt list Inst gt install Inst gt go Inst gt quit 4 The plug ins are installed to usr discreet sparks Furnace3 1v1 5 Proceed to licensing Furnace Installing Furnace on Discreet Linux Downloads are available from www thefoundry co uk 1 Log in as root 2 Download the Furnace software You should get a file called Furnace3 1v1_Spark4 0 linux x86 release 32 run 3 Install the software with the command Furnace3 1v1_Spark4 0 linux x86 release 32 run 4 The plug ins are installed to usr discreet sparks Furnace3 1v1 5 Proceed to licensing Furnace Installing Furnace on Burn Downloads are available from www thefoundry co uk On each linux machine running Burn 1 Log in as root 2 Download the Furnace software You should get a file called Furnace3 1v1_Spark4 0 linux x86 release 32 Burn run 3 Install the software using the command Furnace3 1v1_Spark4 0 linux x86 release 32 Burn run The Foundry Furnace 18 INTRODUCTION 4 The plug ins are installed to usr discreet sparks Furnace3 1v1 5 Repeat this for each burn station 6 No license is required for Furnace on Burn All Burn versions of the software are provided free of licensing so you may install and use this software on as many Burn nodes as you have available to you Note The Furnace 3 1 sparks must have EXACTLY the sam
78. This is a major new release of Furnace for Discreet including new plug ins and improvements Release Date October 2006 Requirements Flame Flint Fire Inferno or Smoke Flame 9 5 5 9 0 8 5 on Irix Flint 9 0 on Linux 32 and Burn 1 5 and 2 0 have been tested Foundry FLEXIm Tools FFT 4 0v1 or later for floating license support New Features 1 F_ColourAlign 2 F_Correlate The Foundry Furnace 234 APPENDIX A 3 F_DeBlur 4 F_DeNoise 5 F_Depth 6 F_MatchGrade 7 F_MatteToRoto 8 F_MotionBlur 9 F MotionMatte 10 F PlanarPatcher 11 F_Splicer Improvements 1 FLEXIm the plug ins are licensed with FLEXIm Bug Fixes 1 Various floating license bugs affecting sites running very large numbers of licenses have been fixed with the intro duction of FLEXIm licensing 2 F_WireRemoval BUG ID 555 fixed for working at proxy resolution 3 F_Tile BUG ID 133 Fill Output Y parameter now works correctly Fill Output X used to control both dimen sions 4 F_RigRemoval BUG ID 119 intermittent corruption in dif ference key is now filled in correctly 5 F_SmartFill BUG ID 104 Use Guess parameter now func tions correctly it was ignored in previous versions 6 F_ReGrain BUG ID 105 Green Response parameter now controls the green channel rather than Blue Response controlled both blue and green 7 F_ReGrain BUG ID 118 Reset All resets the analysis re
79. This test image is composed from a section of the input image surrounded by a uniform solid colour sampled from the image with the grain applied Figure 26 10 on the preceding page If the inner area is indistinguishable Furnace The Foundry Parameters 171 from the outer area then you have a good grain sample Figure 26 8 on page 169 e Result shows the input image with the grain applied Grain Frame sets which frame of the second input is sampled for grain the onscreen selection box is only visible when you are currently on this frame on the timeline Sample Left the left hand edge of the grain sample box Sample Right the right hand edge of the grain sample box Sample Top the top edge of the grain sample box Sample Bottom the bottom edge of the grain sample box Scale adjusts the size of the grain granules Scale R adjusts the size of the grain granules in the red channel Scale G adjusts the size of the grain granules in the green channel Scale B adjusts the size of the grain granules in the blue channel Compare switch this on to split screen the Result and the Source Wipe sets the position of the vertical split screen Compare With sets what to compare the Result with Source use the first Source input on the left Grain use the second Grain input on the left Process Red Channel switch this on to process the red chan nel Process Green Channel switch this on to process the green c
80. a crude colour image where the colours correspond to the colours of the structures in the missing region Then try adjusting Use Guess to determine how strictly the output follows this guess image F SmartFill has two inputs Source is the frame containing the missing pixels that need to be repaired and guess is an optional painted image showing the underlying structure of the missing region The Foundry Furnace 186 SMARTFILL Parameters Fill The parameters for this plug in are described below Matte toggles between using a drawn roto or the second input as the matte defining the area to be repaired Block Size specifies the size of the block of pixels used to copy structure from the image to the missing region In Figure 29 7 the block size is large and so the text on the building is copied well In Figure 29 8 the block size is small and the text is not copied as well Figure 29 7 Block Size 7 Figure 29 8 Block Size 1 Figure 29 9 shows the original image before the lamppost was removed with F_SmartFill Figure 29 9 Original Image X Search Range specifies the horizontal width of the search region examined to find suitable pixels to fill the missing region Y Search Range specifies the vertical width of the search region examined to find suitable pixels to fill the missing re gion If the texture pattern is predominantly horizontal you should make the Y Search Range small In Figure 29 10 we
81. acrovision com Figure 1 1 Unlicensed spark For information on licensing Furnace displaying the Imhostid setting up a floating license server adding new license keys and managing license usage across a network you should read Furnace The Foundry Removing Furnace from Irix 19 Removing Furnace from Irix Documentation Network Rendering the Foundry FLEXIm Tools FFT User Guide which can be down loaded from our web site If you wish to completely remove Furnace 32 bit sparks from your system use the following command as root versions remove Furnace3 1v1 Spark4 0 irix mips release 32 or to remove the 64 bit sparks versions remove Furnace3 1vl Spark4 0 irix mips release 64 This User Guide is installed alongside the sparks in a directory called docs A number of plug ins in Furnace require cached data from pre vious frames to generate a new frame Batch scripts containing these sparks will render correctly if executed locally on your Discreet system but will fail if rendered using Burn across mul tiple machines on a network as these cached frames will not be available to construct the new frame These network rendering restrictions apply to the following sparks or parameter settings e DeFlicker e DeGrain with temporal switched on e Steadiness with the reference set to Previous e WireRemoval with tracking switched on or rendering with RollingRepair e BlockTexture with Tempor
82. al Consistency switched on e Splicer with Temporal Consistency switched on e Correlate The Foundry Furnace 20 INTRODUCTION About Furnace Plug ins Other Foundry Products All Furnace plug ins integrate seamlessly into Discreet They are applied to your clips as you would any other spark and they can all be animated using the standard animation tools The Foundry is a leading developer of plug in visual effects for film and video post production Its products include Furnace Tinder Tinderbox Keylight and Anvil and run on a variety of compositing platforms including Flame Flint Fire Inferno and Smoke from Discreet Shake Avid DS and After Effects For the full list of products and supported platforms see our web site www thefoundry co uk Tinder and Tinderbox are collections of image processing ef fects including blurs distortion effects background genera tors colour tools wipes matte tools paint effects lens flares and much more Anvil is a collection of colour correction and colour manipula tion tools originally developed by First Art Keylight is an award winning blue green screen keyer giving results that look photographed not composited The Keylight algorithm was developed by the Computer Film Company who were honoured with a technical achievement award for digital compositing from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Visit The Foundry s web site at www thefoundry co uk for fur
83. al Smoothness sets the smoothness of the vectors for the local motion Furnace The Foundry Parameters 153 Smoothing Iterations sets the number of times the vectors are combed to bring rogue vectors into line A larger value will produce smoother more consistent results but will take longer to render Matte a matte can be used to separate foreground and back ground motion to improve vectors for occluded and revealed regions This parameter switches this on and off and inverts the matte The matte could be taken from the second input or a roto drawn using the Roto Matte tools e None no matte used e Luminance use the luminance of the supplied matte e Inverted Luminance use the inverted luminance of the supplied matte Build From One Image switch this on to build the missing frame from a single valid frame This will result in a sharper image but more jerky motion Show Vectors switch this on to display the motion vectors over the image A motion vector is the estimated direction a pixel will move between two frames say frame 1 and frame 2 Motion vectors are used to build frames between frame 1 and 2 A forward motion vector is the estimated direction a pixel moves when going from frame 1 to frame 2 and is shown in red whereas a backwards vector estimates the direction from frame 2 to frame 1 and is shown in blue Vectors have both magnitude and a direction These vectors cannot be edited Correct Lu
84. alyse off and experiment with different settings for Motion Smooth ing Increase Motion Smoothing to remove more camera shake Decrease it to keep the camera motion By default F_Steadiness is in Analyse mode In this mode tracking data is continually stored in the controls under the DataOut control group In general you can ignore this data If however you wish to steady a shot apply other effects to it and then restore the original camera shake again you should e With Analyse clicked on process the clip as normal to produce your steady output e Turn Analyse off before saving the setup e After treating the steadied clip reload F Steadiness with the treated clip With Analyse still off click on Invert Transform Process and you should get your original motion back F_Steadiness has one input the shot to be steadied The parameters for this spark are described below Motion Smoothing controls the amount of camera motion kept verses the amount of unsteadiness removed Increase this value for smoother motion Step Size it is rarely necessary to find the optimum trans formation for all pixels and so to speed up the process the image is sampled with a frequency of Step Size and only these pixels are used to find the transformation Decreasing step size will increase both the processing time and the quality of result Filter is used to control the quality of your processed images by reducing the jagged lines ch
85. ample if you have removed blur from a sequence to comp an extra element in and then wish to apply the original motion blur to the whole sequence The parameters for this plug in are described below The Foundry Furnace 78 DEBLUR DeBlur Blur Size The width in pixels of the blur filter for motion or the diameter of the filter for out of focus blur Blur Type Select Motion for removing motion blur and Ra dial for removing out of focus blur Iterations The number of iterations of the F_DeBlur algo rithm More iterations will give better results but take longer Typically at least 100 iterations are required for a successful deblur but the default is set to 20 to allow quicker initial tuning of the algorithm Output Set to DeBlurred to view the deblurred source image To re apply the blur to the third input switch the output to Blurred Make sure you have connected an image to the third blur input Regularisation Increasing the regularisationFactor will cause the algorithm to concentrate on making the resulting image smooth by reducing noise amplification and ringing but less on removing blur Decreasing regularisationFactor should result in more blur being removed at the expense of increased ringing and noise Beta Increasing beta will result in a sharper image but with more ringing Conversely decreasing beta will result in textures in the image being flattened but with less obvious ringing Thr
86. an gaussian Furnace The Foundry Examples 197 Left Right Top Bottom Src Edge defines the part of the source image that is used to build the final large plate You should usually set this to cover the whole of the source image Start X Y Point specifies the position on the output image where the large plate is first built Crops See Crops on on page 33 Examples The images for the following example can be downloaded from our web site Liberty In this example we take a panning shot of the side of Liberty on Carnaby Street and build a large plate i ghi i 1 a Figure 30 6 F_SmartPlate Download File smartplateliberty tar gz Step by Step 1 Start Flame and import the Liberty clip Play it to get a sense of the motion 2 Resize the Liberty clip from PAL to 1000x1500 pixels padding the outside as shown in Figure 30 7 on the next page The Foundry Furnace 198 SMARTPLATE Figure 30 7 Resize and pad the clip 3 Load F_SmartPlate into a sparks button and apply it to the Liberty clip as both inputs 4 View the Source and resize the Src Edge rectangle over the image as shown in Figure169 Figure 30 8 Resize Src Edge box over the Source image 5 View the result Switch off Rotate set Fit To to Current Plate set Frame Combiner to median and Weight to Flat 6 Move the Start Point so that the image is built at the top then extends downwards To get this right usual
87. anner on successive frames F_BlockTexture can also be used for crowd replication In the example here the original image is a locked off shot of a small crowd filling only part of a stadium During the sequence the crowd stand up and wave flags By drawing a matte to specify where we want to put new crowd F_BlockTexture can be used to split up the crowd into plausible jigsaw pieces and reassemble them in the locations defined by the matte This spark works temporally so that the new crowd also stand up but at different times to the original You should note that with temporalConsistency switched on the sample texture will be taken from the sample region on the start frame only Any changes to the size or position of the sample region over the sequence will be ignored by the algorithm The algorithm also assumes the matte is unchanging as ee NO A a A larisa menyuni Figure 5 6 Crowd Replication using F_BlockTexture Images courtesy of The Moving Picture Company from the film Mike Bassett England Manager 2001 Film Council Hallmark En tertainment and Entertainment Film Distributors The Foundry Furnace 50 BLOCKTEXTURE Inputs Parameters Texture Tip F BlockTexture has five inputs The first input is the back ground over which the texture will be composited The second and third inputs are textures The fourth input is an optional matte to define the region that will be filled with generated texture
88. aracteristic of pixel devices To render high quality images you should switch filtering on With all image processing you have a trade off between quality and The Foundry Furnace 210 STEADINESS DataOut time Filtering will increase the quality of your image but will also increase the time it takes to process the image e Extreme sinc filtering gives excellent results but is slower to render than the others e High bilinear filtering e Normal point sampling can give poor results but is faster to process Scale switch this on to correct for scale changes in the trans formation Rotate switch this on to correct for rotational changes in the transformation Translate switch this on to correct for translational changes in the transformation Perspective switch this on to correct for perspective changes in the transformation Analyse in analyse mode the spark stores motion data in the animation curves shown under the DataOut control group With Analyse off no motion is calculated and the spark simply uses the precalculated data out of the stored animation Invert Transform normally a transform is applied to the clip to smooth the camera motion When Invert Transform is switched on the opposite correction is applied This is normally only useful when trying to restore stored motion to rewobble a previously steadied clip Clear Motion Cache when using this spark on the Discreet Desktop you may
89. are arriving from off shot on the left Furnace The Foundry Typical results 145 Figure 21 4 Original Figure 21 5 Alpha result Figure 21 6 Foreground result over grey Figure 21 7 Original Figure 21 8 Alpha result Figure 21 9 Foreground resulting over grey The Foundry Furnace 146 MOTIONMATTE Y Figure 21 10 Original Figure 21 11 Alpha result Figure 21 12 Foreground result over grey Furnace The Foundry 147 MotionRepair Introduction Warning Messages This chapter looks at replacing missing or damaged frames from clips using Furnace s plug in F_MotionRepair F_MotionRepair uses the Foundry s advanced motion estima tion technology to quickly replace a damaged or missing frame or part of a frame by interpolating pixels using motion vectors from images either side Figure 22 1 Damaged frame top centre repaired by taking the previous and next frames to construct the missing frame For this to work you have to set keys for the parameter Valid Frame that will define the frames to be repaired Motion vec tors are calculated between the previous and next frames that are marked as good Valid Frame 1 then an inbetween frame or frames is calculated In Figure 22 2 the animation curve for the parameter Valid Frame is shown The two dips define the frames that will be repaired using the frames marked as good that surround them The can be done manually by us
90. arking the regions of dirt can also be provided as in input to the plug in in which case no detection is done The Foundry Furnace 108 DIRTREMOVAL Quick Start and only the regions specified in the matte are repaired This matte could be generated by rendering a clip of the automatic dirt detection from the plug in painting on it to add or remove regions to be repaired and then using it as the matte input to the plug in This would make it a two stage process The matte could also come from an infrared scan of the film that is available as an output from some film scanners The main control provided by the plug in is through a number of aggression levels specified in the Presets This controls the trade off between falsely identifying dirt and failing to spot the dirt Often even if a region of image has been falsely detected as dirt it will be repaired perfectly as the dirt will not have corrupted the motion in the region allowing a high quality motion compensated repair The presets are an overall tuning control that sets nine parameter values For the advanced user it is also possible to finetune these individual parameters for better results on specific sequences In order to understand how to tune the parameters it is first necessary to understand a bit more about the algorithms in volved F_DirtRemoval relives heavily on motion estimation to both detect the dirt and repair the image Where the motion is complex e g
91. arts of the image Filtering sets the quality of filtering used to build the re paired frame e Normal this uses a bilinear interpolation This is quicker to render e Extreme this uses a sinc interpolation filter It s slower than the bilinear interpolation but produces sharper im ages and should be used in the final render Shutter Time sets the equivalent shutter time of the retimed sequence A shutter time of 100 is equivalent to averaging over plus and minus half an input frame which is equivalent to a shutter angle of 360 degrees A shutter time of 50 is equivalent to a shutter angle of 180 degrees Imagine a grey rectangle moving left to right horizontally across the screen The figures below show how shutter time affects the retimed rectangle Shutter Samples sets the number of inbetween images used to create an output image during the shutter time Increase this value for smoother motion blur The Foundry Furnace 128 KRONOS Figure 17 5 Shutter Time Figure 17 6 Shutter Time 50 100 Figure 17 7 Shutter Samples Figure 17 8 Shutter Samples 2 20 Automatic Shutter Time automatically varies the Shutter Time throughout the sequence according to the rate of the retime Show sets the clip to be retimed e Normal the standard retimed output of the Warp clip e Matte the retimed Matte input e Foreground the retimed foreground ignoring motion in the background Only available when U
92. asing softness very slightly and if ringing appears in the output increase errorThreshold by a small amount F_SmartZoom takes only one input which is the sequence from which the high resolution plate is to be made The parameters for this spark are described below Resize sets the scale factor For example a value of 2 will produce an output image of twice as wide and twice as high of the input Note that only integer values are allowed for in the algorithm but non integer values will scale using F SmartZoom then top up with a standard scale The Foundry Furnace 202 SMARTZOOM Crops Scale by default when aligning one frame with another only translational and rotational transforms are used If there are significant scale changes in the sequence turn on scale This will give improved results at the expense of longer computation time Perspective by default when aligning one frame with an other only translational and rotational transforms are used If there are significant perspective changes in the sequence turn on perspective This will give improved results at the expense of longer computation time Softness when combining the sub pixel information from a number of frames it is possible that the resulting image al though containing more information will look overly sharp or harsh The softness parameter controls this harshness by ap plying a subtle filter to the information given by each addi tional fram
93. better results Load F_DeGrain and select a clip that has grain 1 Press Reset All 2 Move the red small rectangle over part of the image that has little image detail Regardless of what you re looking at the source image will be sampled for grain in the area selected Figure 12 1 shows a bad sample area as this has image detail that will be mistaken for grain Far better to pick a plain area as shown in Figure 12 2 Furnace The Foundry Quick Start 93 When you re sampling grain from the current frame the rectangle will turn blue Otherwise it will be red Figure 12 1 Bad Sample Figure 12 2 Good Sample Note Itis very important to select an area with little image detail Failure to do this will give poor results as the algorithm will think the image detail is grain and remove it If the area selected is too small an accurate analysis of the grain is not possible and no degraining takes place A warning message is displayed Switch Temporal on and then render a sequence The result will be degrained using both spatial and temporal filters Working Interactively To speed up the process of fine tuning the degrained image af ter the initial selection you should draw a quick roto on part of the image Only the pixels in this region will be degrained This is much faster than working on the whole image and you can compare the original and degrained image at the roto border Figure 12 3 Roto tool used to hel
94. cales Global Smoothness sets the amount of smoothness applied to the initial coarse motion and Local The Foundry Furnace 124 KRONOS Separating Foreground and Background Motions Flicker Noise Smoothness sets the amount applied to the smaller scales So you should increase Global Smoothness if the overall motion is smooth on a coarse scale and Local Smoothness if the motion is smooth on a more local scale Smoothing Iterations has a similar effect to combing the vectors to remove stragglers In other words if there are one or two vectors pointing in a different direction to the majority round about this parameter will force these stray vectors to line up with the others In creasing Smoothing Iterations will do more combing passes and so produce smoother results but at the expense of longer render times One of the harder areas of motion estimation is handling oc clusions and reveals These are areas of an image where part of an object is being revealed or obscured by another In these cases motion estimation often drags part of the background along with the foreground motion If you have a rotoscoped matte for the foreground object you can switch on Use Mask to allow Kronos to use this as a hint when avoiding dragging By default Kronos uses bilinear interpolation to build the in between images Switching on Sharp Picture will use a sinc interpolation filter and produce sharper results but will also increase the r
95. ce 30 COMMON CONTROLS and not visible Click on these and the timeline will rear range itself so that all keys off that side are now visible Frame All Pan Lock Zoom More keys Figure 3 9 Roto Tools Roto Axis The axis allows you to move rotate and scale the roto It is drawn in the image overlay as a red cross hair with a blue box and green anchorlike handle The red cross hair allows you to move the roto by clicking and dragging it If you select just one of the arms you will move the roto only in that direction This is linked to the Translate X and Translate Y parameters on the Roto Matte control page Figure 3 10 Roto Axis Controls The blue rectangular box allows you to scale the roto about the centre of the axis If you select a corner you will scale in x and y if you choose a single side you will scale only in that direction This is linked to the Scale Scale X and Scale Y parameters on the Roto Matte control page Furnace The Foundry Roto Matte Tool 31 The green anchor allows you to rotate the roto about the centre of the axis This is linked to the Rotate parameter on the Roto Matte control page Roto Data Storage Rotos are saved by encoding them into a Discreet animation curve If you look in the animation sheet you will see a folder called PrivateData this is where they are stored Do not open this folder and do not attempt to modify the keys inside it can and will cause problem
96. ce the stabilised output Figure 4 12 shows the translated and rotated frame 1 stabilised around the fence post The Foundry Furnace 46 ALIGN Figure 4 12 Frame 1 sta Figure 4 13 Frame 25 sta bilised bilised Furnace The Foundry 47 BlockTexture Introduction Furnace includes a number of texture generation sparks These are used to create resolution independent images that have the same look and feel as a small sample region from a source image F_BlockTexture is one such spark and should be used for replicating fairly large scale textures By that we mean textures that contain shapes rather than more uniform textures that would be suited to F_PixelTexture It works by taking blocks of data from the original image and rearranging them in a random fashion but in such a way that the joins between the blocks are invisible and look plausible The size of the blocks depends on the scale of the texture being replicated and the overlap of the blocks controls how well the joins between blocks are hidden This spark tends to generate the best results on more natural looking textures for example leaves blowing in the wind or even crowds of people F_BlockTexture also has the ability to generate temporally consistent frames of textures but only over small motion ranges For hints tips tricks and feedback please visit http support thefoundry co uk Figure 5 1 Original image Figure 5 2 BlockTexture used showin
97. ce this is done switch Process to Penup and view the Result Press F4 You will probably see a semitransparent red region partially obscuring the object you re trying to remove Figure 27 3 This indicates we re not looking forward and or backward far enough in the clip for pixels to repair this area If you increase the Look Ahead Frames parameter the red area will get smaller Figure 27 4 Keep increasing this parameter until the red area just disappears and then render the sequence To completely remove the red pixels in this example you d need a Look Ahead Frames value of 8 If you don t want to render the red fail marker just set the Fail Marker Alpha to zero Figure 27 3 Figure 27 4 lookAheadFrames 3 lookAheadFrames 6 Furnace The Foundry Quick Start 175 Occlusions The algorithm used in F_RigRemoval is unable to differenti ate between multiple foreground objects If there is another foreground object in the sequence that moves through the background region that is being used in the repair this second foreground object will also be cut up and used resulting in an incorrect repair To try and assist in these situations it is possible to mark regions of the image as not to be used for repair by setting their alpha value to mid grey This will ensure that spurious bits of other foreground objects do not appear in the repair Figure 27 5 Original shot In Figure 27 5 we are trying to remove the
98. checked off only this data will be used It will almost never be useful to edit this data but it may be worth understanding what it represents The parameters are pixel offsets for each of the four corners of the image BL BR TL TR denote bottom left bottom right rop left and top right corners of the image respectively Together these show a four corner warp which represents the transform at the current frame See Crops on page 33 All the images for the following examples can be downloaded from our web site In this example we will use the footage of a bike travelling from left to right across the screen Let s assume we want to remove this motorbike by compositing pixels from a clean plate over the bike F_Align can help us create a clean plate or more accurately a clean area by offsetting the clip and lining it up with the reference frame If we have a rough matte of the bike we wish to remove we can use Effects Composite to pull pixels from the aligned clip through the matte and over the reference clip Download File rigsbike tar gz Furnace The Foundry Examples 41 Step by Step Import bike tif Load F_Align into a Sparks button and click on the bike for all the inputs Set the parameters to their defaults with Reset All Switch Frame to Relative Got to frame 15 on the timeline Change Slip Source to 5 to offset the Source clip by five frames as shown in Figure 4 2 Figure
99. ct the results to be as pin sharp as 3D generated Z channels but you should find them useful enough So what can you do with a depth channel One sim ple use would be to apply a depth of field blur so that objects close to and far away from the camera appear out of focus with mid range objects sharp Figure 14 1 Input Figure 14 2 Output Apply F_Depth to the sequence from which you wish to calculate depth If the sequence contains an obvious layer which is the furthest from the camera use the roto matte tools on Roto Matte panel to draw a region over this layer and set Mask to Roto This will force this layer of the image to be the The Foundry Furnace 104 DEPTH Inputs Parameters Roto Mask Examples Leicester Square background and calculate depth relative to this layer Process the sequence to obtain the depth images By default you re asked to draw this region using the built in roto tools F_Depth has two inputs Source the layer from which the depth will be calculated and Mask an optional layer to define the background area The depth channel will be extracted from the source image Background to calculate depth relative to a layer in the im age based on the mask input or roto defined on control page 2 set this to either e None for no background analysis e Mask to use the mask input to indicate background regions e Roto to use the roto tools Smooth Output activates a post p
100. curves drawn between each pair of input points For example if segments 1 then one curve will be drawn between each pair of input vertices as shown in Figure 16 10 If the object has a complex edge as shown by the pink line in Figure 16 11 then increase segments to more accurately model this shape as shown by the cyan line in Figure 16 11 For simple shapes with smooth edges a smaller number may be sufficient but the idea is to increase the number of segments until the edge roto just matches the shape of the edge Figure 16 10 Segments 1 Figure 16 11 Segments 25 Export Raw allows you to save the output edge roto in RAW format This can then be imported into Discreet s keyer The file gets saved to usr discreet lt discreetversion gt path Output Control Output controls the image to be rendered displayed e Gradient this edge detect is what the algorithm sees Figure 16 12 e Matte the edge as a matte Figure 16 13 Figure 16 12 Segments 1 Figure 16 13 Segments 25 Furnace The Foundry Examples 119 e Edge Roto the roto as a matte Figure 16 14 e Source the source image Figure 16 15 Figure 16 14 Roto Segments Figure 16 15 Source 1 Roto Matte See Roto Matte Tool on page 25 Examples All the images for the following examples can be downloaded from our web site Mike In t his shot we will create a matte for Mike s head More accurately we going to Save a rotospline that w
101. d preserve the grain and get rid of the artifacts The Foundry Furnace 222 WIREREMOVAL Figure 35 3 Left to right Original wire Gradient Length 6 Gradient Length O Inpainting Gradient Factor if the reconstruction method is set to sim ple then the wire is replaced by stitching pixels along a line perpendicular to the wire If the method is set to gradient pixels are stitched at an angle across the wire determined by information under the wire This angle is computed automat ically but limited to 45 degrees off the perpendicular The Gradient Factor allows this angle to be increased to correct for detail that crosses under the wire at a shallow angle Figure 35 4 GradientFactor Figure 35 5 GradientFactor 1 50 In Figure 35 4 and Figure 35 5 there were two wires cross ing a roof at a shallow angle The bottom wire under the red circle has been removed leading to some subtle smudging Fig ure 35 4 This can be reduced by increasing the GradientFactor to 50 Figure 35 5 Sinc Filter switch this on for the best possible filtering On most wires this improves our ability to subtract the jaggies along the edges of the wire without confusing them for grain If your repair still has clearly visible periodic artifacts after removal try toggling this off Automatic Gain switch this on to remove colour gradients in the image which might occur across the wire These are Furnace The Foundry
102. e The larger the path the better the quality of join Edge Blend the amount of blur between the source image and the new texture A small amount is good to help hide the edges but too much will result in an obvious softness Luminance Match switch this on to match the luminance of the new texture with the luminance of the source region in order to help hide the join Luminance Blur controls how much effect Luminance Match has on the new texture See Roto Matte Tool on page 25 A variety of textures can be downloaded from our web site The Foundry Furnace 52 CHANNELREPAIR ChannelRepair Introduction This chapter looks at the repair of damage that occurs only in one colour channel For hints tips tricks and feedback please visit http support thefoundry co uk Occasionally damage can occur in only one or two colour chan nels in an image for example a scratch may be only two chan nels deep or chemical damage may only affect the top layer of the film In these cases F ChannelRepair can be used to repair the damaged channel s by using information from the other undamaged colour channels sA yuh yes ss A AS Veh MA MA Y is Figure 6 1 Blue channel damage As with many of the other Furnace plug ins this can also be improved by using the Foundry s advanced motion estimation technology to propagate clean pixels through the sequence With the default settings F_ChannelRepair will only use
103. e The value of softness is in pixels If this is set too high no useful information will be added and the resulting resized image will look like a simple bilinear interpolation of the original If it is set too low the resulting frame may look unpleasantly sharp Error Threshold another artefact that may occur when com bining sub pixel information is ringing along any edges in the image Error threshold attempts to control this by clipping any overshoots that may occur when combing information from all the images in the sequence If it is set too high then no addi tional information will be included and the resulting image will look like a simple bilinear interpolation of the original Filter sets the filter type used for the pixel interpolation e Box low quality but quick e Gaussian higher quality but slower than box e Sinc highest quality giving sharp images but slower than gaussian Generate Final Zoom simply steps the through the sequence but only produces the final zoomed image instead of giving a best guess at each frame which would happen with normal processing Left Right Top Bottom Src Edge defines the part of the source image that is used to build the scaled plate You should usually set this to cover the whole of the source image See Crops on on page 33 Furnace The Foundry Examples 203 Examples Newspaper The images for the following example can be downloaded from our web site
104. e Software or Documentation or take any other action that could adversely affect the property rights of The Foundry or any Third Party Licensor To the extent that Licensee is authorized to make copies of the Software or Documentation under this Agreement Licensee shall reproduce in and on all such copies any copyright and or other proprietary rights no tices provided in and on the materials supplied by The Foundry hereunder Nothing in this Agreement shall be deemed to give Licensee any rights in the trademarks service marks patents trade secrets copyrights or other intellectual property rights of The Foundry or any Third Party Licensor and Licensee shall be strictly prohibited from using the name trademarks or ser vice marks of The Foundry or any Third Party Licensor in Li censee s promotion or publicity without The Foundry s express written approval Licensee understands that the benefits granted to Licensee hereunder are contingent upon Licensee s payment in full of the license fee payable in connection herewith the License Fee Licensee agrees to pay and indemnify The Foundry from claims for any local state or national tax exclusive of taxes based on net income duty tariff or other impost related to or arising from the transaction contemplated by this Agreement The Foundry warrants that for a period of ninety 90 days after delivery of the Software a the machine readable elec tronic files constituting the
105. e ae a 185 ce oe eh ee e o es a ee ee dde 185 Parameters oea med ee CRS He Ee AA Ee Eo a 186 A BiG ee Re de ee He ek td Se ee Glare 186 ROMA co ede eee eee eo eee eyes oe Se ee x 187 CODOS iras Ae EERE EAR ELH AS EEA EER SR ESS 187 MAS seei 64S ES OR PS BS OS Br ee as EE RO Se Hes 188 Trafalgar Square 6 5 6 amp 9 Se EE SE OE eR eS eS 188 Pee wa ke whe oe A A ok Oe A 188 SmartPlate 190 INFIERE CASES EES ES EES EEA ES 664444 190 Putting the Camera Move Back ck ke eo he ew ee eee ER ES 193 Quick Start ico coca a HOR ORAS A a a 193 We ke RE Se ESS OB ESS EE ESS OE ES OES EH ES E 194 Parameters o ke Feet ewe oO heen debe a e we 194 EAS ea GEYER EAM EES AR ERA DS ey 194 GODS e oth 8 ed Ge ADE RR AR AR ARA a 197 Furnace The Foundry Contents xiii SAAS ra ida ees 197 E sees Sey ww Bk oe ae ee Ee ea Re 197 Liberty Banner o bo EW EAA ENE ES ADEN ESE MK HARES G 199 SmartZoom 200 ROUEN lt o kk be VAR PRES ew hee hee PAE ESE Oe R 200 UU AI 201 ee ay ae oe O E E ee EA 201 Parametrs scsi A A BARA APS ES 201 POO 4 244 vow se e AR AR 4 201 A ocs RY 3k Se 6AM AEE CRRA RAMS AE EMS ee EAE 202 Examples oa ced ae a a cn AA EIA AAA a 203 MENS o e amp Se ke Oe we ee de Oe ee e nd e al 203 Splicer 205 ICONO oe ecaa a RAH ORS ERAS EAN e a 205 NEN SEAM Saca a es A iaa Gude Bee id a 205 IT oe ehh ee o ee es e ee ee 206 Parameters II 206 NOMINA ia dida 206 LODE We ee a e Ns a 207 EXAMPICS 4504 465 0 da AAA 207 Hedge e
106. e camera move can be put back The parameters for this plug in are described below Generate sets whether to create a large plate or reapply a Camera move on an input plate e Use Full Plate takes the second input and applies the camera move from the first input to it e Lock builds a large output plate in the background then reinstates the original camera move The effect of this is to remove foreground motion while keeping the camera move e Full Plate takes the first input and creates a large plate from it This is the default Translate X switch this off to ignore horizontal differences when lining up plates from a vertical camera move Translate Y switch this off to ignore vertical shifts when lining up plates from a horizontal camera pan Without this errors build up causing the long strip produced to curve away from a long rectangle Rotate by default the alignment process will attempt to match any rotational movement of the camera Switch this off to ignore rotational moves Scale by default when aligning one frame with another only translational and rotational transforms are used If there are significant scale changes in the sequence turn on scale This will give improved results at the expense of longer computation time Perspective by default when aligning one frame with an other only translational and rotational transforms are used If there are significant perspective changes in the sequence turn on p
107. e directory path as the Furnace 3 1 on Flame If they are different remote rendering of these sparks on Discreet will fail Licensing Furnace Furnace uses FLEXIm encryption in the license keys Node locked and floating licenses are supported You can get time limited demo licenses from our web site or by contacting The Foundry directly You will need the Imhostid of your machine to get a license The Imhostid is a unique number for your machine To display this number download the Foundry System ID utility from our web site www thefoundry co uk licensing Without a valid software license key Furnace plug ins will render diagnostic text to help you identify the problem with the license Figure 1 1 FOUNDRY LICENSE ERROR REPORT imestamp Wed Mar 29 12 21 13 2006 License Requested furnace 3 0 for discreet interactive with options all f mattetoroto Extended Info F_MatteToRoto for flame frame 1 FLEX1m LICENSE DIAGNOSTICS Cannot find license file The license files or license server system network addresses attempted are listed below Use LM LICENSE_FILE to use a different license file or contact your software provider for a license file Feature furnace _discreet_i Filename usr local foundry FLEX1m lic License path usr local foundry FLEX1m lic FLEXnet Licensing error 1 359 System Error 2 No such file or directory For further information refer to the FLEXnet Licensing End User Guide available at www m
108. e region The sample region is shown as a red rectangular box over the image Block Size the size of the building blocks used to make the new texture Furnace The Foundry Examples 51 Roto Matte Examples Warning Overlap the amount the building blocks are overlap A larger overlap is more likely to generate a better edge join Blend Size the amount of blur at the edges between building blocks A small amount is good to help hide the edges on some images but too much will result in an obvious softness Number of Samples the number of different blocks that are tried before choosing the best match The higher the number the better the match but the longer the render time Seed the random number used to start the texture genera tion process Select another seed to see a different texture pattern Temporal Consistency switch this on to force temporal con sistency in the new texture between successive frames Note that the sample region and the matte that the texture will be pasted into will be taken from the first frame only Any changes to the sample region or matte on subsequent frames will be ignored by the algorithm if Temporal Consistency is switched on F BlockTexture with Temporal Consistency switched on cannot be dis tributed across multiple machines on a network render farm See Network Rendering on page 19 Path Width sets the width of the join between the source image and the new textur
109. e scratch we choose the optimum angle across the scratch to interpolate a repair This is done on a per pixel basis which can lead to a very noisy repair as the optimum angle can change rapidly Median Width is the width of a median filter that smooths the choice of angle in order to produce a less noisy repair Motion by default a spatial only repair algorithm is used switch this on to allow the motion interpolated pixels from the previous corrected frame to be used in the repair Crops See Crops on on page 33 The Foundry Furnace 184 SMARTFILL SmartFill Introduction This chapter looks at texture generation using Furnace s plug in F_SmartFill For hints tips tricks and feedback please visit http support thefoundry co uk F SmartFill is an intelligent fill tool designed to automatically fill a missing region in an image For example it could be used to remove an unwanted object from a scene or replace damaged pixels The algorithm takes textures from spatially nearby regions to recreate the image whilst ensuring important structure is maintained For example edges or lines crossing the missing region should be accurately continued and correctly join up Figure 29 1 Before Figure 29 2 After Where there is a complicated underlying structure it is also possible to supply a guess image This is a crude painting of the underlying regions There needs to be no detail in the guess image as this will be su
110. eMatte Simply apply MotionMatte to a sequence to be segmented Use the Roto Mask tools on control page 2 to paint a garbage mask of the foreground or if a garbage mask already exists use this as the second input This gives the algorithm a more precise idea of which areas of the image are foreground and which are background By default the roto tool is on and you will be prompted to draw a garbage mask The Rolling control is on by default in this case the plug in re uses results from previously calculated frames to improve the current frame calculation both in terms of speed and qual ity This control should be turned off if the render is to be distributed across multiple machines on a render farm MotionMatte has 2 inputs 1 the Source clip to be segmented Furnace The Foundry Parameters 143 Parameters Roto Mask Typical results Man holding baby 2 the Mask input as a garbage mask around the foreground region Rolling when on default this control indicates that the plug in should use the results from previous frames to help improve the quality and speed of calculation of the current frame If the render is to be distributed to a render farm this control should be switched off as the results will then be af fected by the number of frames any given machine does in a single render run Output whether to output the generated alpha channel as grey scale or to output the premultiplied result
111. each pixel into a square e Circle grows each pixel into a circle Colour sets the flat colour used as a background in the test composite Use this to judge the quality of the matte See Roto Matte Tool on page 25 All the images for the following examples can be downloaded from our web site The Foundry Furnace 180 RIGREMOVAL Bike This is a handheld panning shot of a motorcyclist riding along a street in London Figure 27 12 Before Figure 27 13 After Figure 27 12 shows the original clip with the motorbike in the centre Figure 27 12 shows the clip with the bike removed Download File rigsbike tar gz Step by Step 1 2 3 Import bike tif Load F_RigRemoval and select the bike clip First you should keyframe a roto shape over the motor bike you wish to remove To speed this process up view the Source press F1 and set Process to Preview Switch on Roto and select Shape Square Make sure Full Im age Widget is selected in the Display Tools Position the onscreen rectangle over the bike on frame 1 move onto frame 10 reposition and resize the box and repeat for frames 20 30 and 40 Go back to frame 1 Set process to Penup and view the Result F4 Increase the Look Ahead Frames until the red pixels disappear A value of 8 should do it Process the sequence You may see some red pixels creep into the shot To fix this simply increase the Look Ahead Frames to 12 and process
112. ed without the cost of reanalyzing the mo tion In this example we will use F_Align to stabilise a left to right pan as shown in Figure 4 10 and Figure 4 11 Download Files alignjb 1 tar gz alignjb2 tar gz Import JB1 tif Play the clip Furnace The Foundry Examples 45 Figure 4 10 Poster Figure 4 11 Bus Load F Align into a Sparks button and click on just JB1 for the three input clips Reset the plug in using Reset All and Clear Motion Cache on the Main control page Set Frame to Static to show that we are stabilising to a single frame Set Match to Ref To Ref to show that we are only inter ested in the relationship between frames on the Refer ence clip and not interested in the relationship between the Source and the Reference On the Crops Box control page set the X Crop and Y Crop popups to Colour so that we can see the outline of the transformed image Back on the Main control page set the Static Frame to 20 this is the reference frame we want to stabilise to Click Incremental on note that this control is only visible if Match is set to Ref To Ref This means that rather than calculating the transformation from the current frame to frame 20 in one go the plug in calculates the sum of all the incremental differences between the current frame and frame 20 one frame at a time You will need to wait for this initial processing to finish Process the clip to produ
113. eduction Increase this to smooth off colour variations Very high values will cause the image to lose quality A value of zero effectively switches off any gradient removal Tile Left the left position of sample region Tile Right the right position of sample region Tile Top the top position of sample region Tile Bottom the bottom position of sample region Tile Horizontally switch this on to use the algorithm to tile horizontally When switched off the tiles will have straight left and right edges Tile Vertically switch this on to use the algorithm to tile vertically When switched off the tiles will have straight top and bottom edges Fill Output X repeats the tiling horizontally to fill the width of the output image Fill Output Y repeats the tiling vertically to fill the height of the output image Stretch to Fit switch this on to render a single repeating tile that can be used elsewhere for seamless texture mapping A variety of textures in TIFF format including pebbles and planks can be downloaded from our web site Download File textures tar gz Furnace The Foundry 217 WireRemoval Introduction Clean Plates This chapter looks at the removal of wires from images For hints tips tricks and feedback please visit http support thefoundry co uk Many effects movies feature complicated stunts that require an actor to be suspended by wires Figure 35 1 for their safety T
114. egion The size of the missing region and the speed of the background dictate how far away from the current frame it is necessary to search to find the correct information The missing region is defined either by a matte loaded as the second input or as a keyframed roto shape from within the spark Load F_RigRemoval into a spark button and select a clip from the reels F_RigRemoval has two inputs a clip and a matte The Foundry Furnace 174 RIGREMOVAL Tip Tip More often than not you won t have a matte that roughly defines the area you want to remove so ignore this for now and select the same clip twice The first step is to define the foreground region to be replaced by keyframing a roto shape using the built in tools This region does not need to be the exact foreground region just a very rough outline In this particular example we ll use a square shape Avoid making the shape unnecessarily large as this will increase processing time In the Rig edit menu make sure the Rig Region is set to Roto and from the Roto Mask menu select Roto Shape Square F_RigRemoval analyses pixel movement from other frames in the clip so can be a little slow to process When setting up the roto shape animation it s quicker if you view the Source Press F1 and switch Process to Preview Make sure AutoKey is on and then keyframe the position and scale of the roto square throughout the clip over the rig you want to remove On
115. ender times By default Kronos uses the pre vious and next image to build the output image Switching on Build From One Image will force the algorithm to use only the closer image to generate the output image If the motion vectors aren t exactly correct this will result in a sharper image but the motion will appear jerky Motion estimation algorithms are particularly sensitive to lumi nance changes Switching on Correct Luminance will attempt to equalize the luminance between the frames before calculat ing the motion The original images are used to build the final result and so the luminance changes will still be present in the final output but the vectors should be more accurate Finally it is possible to set the limit below which Kronos will ignore any pixel difference between frames and not calculate the motion This is particularly useful if you have heavy grain on the images and you don t want that to affect the motion estimation Increasing Error Threshold will cause Kronos to ignore more low level detail and so ignore the random motion Furnace The Foundry Motion Blur 125 Motion Blur Inputs Parameters Kronos of the grain Increasing Error threshold to 100 will cause Kronos to ignore all motion and the output will be similar to a frame blend instead You can add motion blur without retiming To do this set the output time curve to be the same as the input time curve You can do with by setting Timing
116. ent frame otherwise it will be drawn dashed If the AutoKey button is on every time you manipulate the roto a keyframe will be added You can also add a key at the current frame by clicking the Add Roto Key button If there is a key at the current frame you can delete it by clicking on the Delete Roto Key The button Delete Animation will remove all roto keys Just above the Spark timeline we display the roto timeline We do this to show the location of the keyframes Each keyframe is drawn as a Small triangle with the current frame being drawn as a yellow bar Keyframes Current Frame Figure 3 8 Roto Timeline You can change the frame a key is on simply by clicking and dragging it in the timeline its frame number will be displayed next to it The range of frames being displayed in the timeline can be changed using the tools inside it Figure 3 9 on the following page they are e a lock icon which indicates that the displayed timeline is locked to the Discreet timeline a frame all icon which will break the lock to the Discreet timeline and set the range so that all keys are visible a pan icon which will break the lock to the Discreet timeline and slide the range of visible frames up and down e two zoom icons which will zoom into and out of the timeline e two arrow icons at the very end of the timeline which indicate that more keys are off the end of the timeline The Foundry Furna
117. ent frame in the timeline For example to slow down a 50 frame clip by half The Foundry Furnace 126 KRONOS set the timeline frame range from 1 to 100 then keyframe this parameter so that at the start of the clip Frame 1 and at the end of the clip Frame 100 See Figure91 This would be the same as setting the Speed to 50 Figure 17 4 Snapshots of the timeline to show Frame set tings Vector Detail defines the amount of detail in the motion vectors The maximum value of 100 will generate one vector per pixel This will produce the most accurate vectors but will take longer to render Note Ifyou are working with a 1K proxy for example and adjust the parameters in Kronos until you re happy and then switch to the full resolution 2K plate if you want approx the same vectors as in the proxy you should half the vector detail Global Smoothness sets the smoothness of the vectors for the coarse motion Local Smoothness sets the smoothness of the vectors for the local motion Smoothing Iterations sets the number of times the vectors are combed to bring rogue vectors into line A larger value will produce smoother more consistent results but will take longer to render Matte switch this on to use the Matte input to separate foreground and background motion to improve vectors for oc cluded and revealed regions Switching this on will increase rendering times e None no matte e Luminance luminance
118. ers Repair See also Kronos on page 122 for a more detailed description of these parameters Figure 6 3 Repaired image F_ChannelRepair has three inputs The first input source contains the damaged frame or sequence The second in put matte should contain a frame or sequence that specifies where the damage occurs White areas are repaired The third input reference is an optionally supplied clean plate The parameters for this plug in are described below Method there are two possible techniques to take informa tion from one channel to repair another e Rematch attempts to make the local statistics between Use Channel and Repair Channel identical e Blend feathers the duplicated pixels from Use Channel into Repair Channel Repair Channel selects the damaged channel of the image to be repaired Use Channel selects the undamaged channel of the image from which to take information to make the repair Smoothness sets the number of times the damage parame ters are smoothed between blocks Use Reference by default F ChannelRepair uses only spatial information from the current frame Switch this on to allow pixels from the a clean plate second input to be matchmoved Furnace The Foundry Parameters 55 Roto Matte Crops into the damaged region Where pixels from other frames are not available the standard spatial repair is used Matte sets the matte used to define the area of re
119. erspective This will give improved results at the expense of longer computation time Frame Step it is rarely necessary to use every image in a sequence to generate the larger plate Frame Step sets how many frames are missed out so for a 50 frame sequence if Furnace The Foundry Parameters 195 the step size is set to 2 then you will only need to render 25 frames Generate Final Plate instead of having to process every frame out and the delete all but the last one you can use this button to automatically step through the sequence and simply gener ate the last image Fit To when stitching frames together each frame can either be aligned to the previous frame in the sequence Previous Frame or onto the output plate Current Plate The advan tage of aligning them onto the output plate is to allow frames to be stitched back on to earlier parts of the sequence For example consider an S shaped camera move across the build ing Current Plate must be selected to ensure the end of the S is correctly stitched back on to the top of the S e Previous Frame frames are aligned to the previous frame This is quicker than the current plate method and is suit able for left to right or right to left pans e Current Plate frames are aligned to the output plate This is slower than the previous frame method but allows for the sequence to double back on itself Frame Combiner selects the method used to combine frames
120. es 1 BUG ID 493 various minor memory leaks and not a valid system pointer messages have been fixed Known Bugs amp Workarounds 1 F WireRemoval BUG ID 451 shearing on the repair is visible on shallow wires that go offscreen bottom or left but only if sinc filtering is switched on 2 On Linux 64 machines plug ins may take up to 9 seconds to enter the editing menu Not all machines are affected in this way Furnace 1 1v3 This is a maintenance release of Furnace on Discreet to support Discreet Linux Note Furnace1 1vl and 1 1v2 were never released Release Date May 2005 The Foundry Furnace 238 APPENDIX A Furnace 1 0v2 Requirements Flame Flint Fire Inferno or Smoke Flame 8 5 9 0 on Discreet Irix Flint 9 0 on Discreet Linux and Burn 1 5 have been qualified Irix and Linux are supported at 32 bit only New Features 1 Discreet Linux is now supported Improvements 1 Licensing diagnostic information is now rendered to the screen if the plug in is unlicensed Bug Fixes 1 F WireRemoval BUG ID 210 a memory bug has been fixed that would print a warning to the shell in Furnace 1 0v2 2 Burn BUG ID 461 Batch jobs submitted on a network on Burn stations that use Kronos would produce an output clip where the first N frames were frozen where N is the number of Burn renderers This has been fixed Known Bugs Workarounds There are no known bugs This is a maintenance release of F
121. ese outputs to do the composite yourself The Foundry Furnace 166 REGRAIN ReGrain Introduction This chapter describes replicating film grain using the Furnace spark F_ReGrain For hints tips tricks and feedback please visit http support thefoundry co uk Furnace s ReGrain plug in is used to add grain to a sequence It has been designed to sample an area of grain from one image and then to generate unlimited amounts of this grain with exactly the same statistics as the original This new grain can then be applied to another image Figure 26 1 Kodak 320 Figure 26 2 F_ReGrain Figure 26 1 shows an enlarged and exaggerated sample of grain from Kodak 320 film stock Furnace s ReGrain was used to sample the original Kodak 320 stock and synthesize a plate of grain The result is shown in Figure 26 2 Note that the grain characteristics closely match the original Similarly Figure 26 3 is a sample from Kodak 500 film stock and Figure26 4 shows this replicated using Furnace s ReGrain Figure 26 3 Kodak 500 Figure 26 4 F_ReGrain Furnace The Foundry Quick Start 167 Quick Start Note Load F_ReGrain into a sparks button Select two clips from the reels Grain will be added to the first input Source and sampled from the second input Grain You should be working at full resolution and not proxy resolution F_ReGrain will not work at proxy resolution See Proxy Resolutions on page 169
122. eshold A characteristic of all deblur algorithms is that they produce ringing on edges in the image F_DeBlur mitigates this by applying bounds to the image These bounds suppress the effects of ringing in plain areas of the image Where and when to apply these bounds is determined by Threshold Note the magnitude of the bounds is determined by Beta A smaller threshold means the bounds are applied less frequently result ing in more ringing but better debluring A larger threshold results in greater application of the bounds and hence less ringing but textures may be flattened and less blur will be removed Noise Estimate The amount of noise on the image Increase if your image is very noisy or grainy and decrease if it is very clean Calculate Angle The algorithm tries to automatically work out the direction of the motion blur from frame to frame by calculating the global motion If the motion is purely horizontal or you want to make the motion blur horizontal by pre rotating the image you can turn off calculateRotation Blur Direction If calculateRotation is turned off this vari Furnace The Foundry Examples 79 Examples LibertyBlurred able is used for the angle of the motion blur This is measured in degrees DeBlur Region Selects the region of the image to be de blurred Sample Right the right position of sampleRegion Sample Top the top position of sampleRegion Sample Left the left position
123. ess Step Size this is equivalent to the subPixelResolution setting on the tracker It is rarely necessary to find the optimum transformation for all pixels and so to speed up the process the image is sampled with frequency stepSize and only these pixels are used to find the transformations Decreasing step size will increase the processing time but may give you more accurate tracking Auto Key Frame Roto when on the internal Roto is updated automatically during analysis Toggling this control from true to false will delete all key frames apart from that at Repair Frame Normally this is set to true however it s useful when the track has gone wrong as it enables you to point the track in the right direction by keyframing the tracking region Becuase The Foundry Furnace 164 PLANARPATCHER Roto Mask Repair Matte Centres Example Table of this any current keyframes and the tracking cache will be deleted when you change this control from true to false Output which image to output e Comp Composites the Repair into the Source using the Repair Matte e Warped the Repair warped into place which would be comped onto the Source for Comp Matte Warped the Repair Matte warped into place that would be used as the matte for Comp Analyse whether to analyse for new values or use the key framed values See Roto Matte Tool on page 25 To speed up the fine tuning of the image draw a smal
124. etween blocks Matte this is used to mask off parts of the image so that they are not used in calculating the global flicker White areas The Foundry Furnace 88 DEFLICKER Note Note Note of the matte are used to analyse global flicker Black areas of the matte will not be used See the tutorial example Bike on page 90 e Roto use the roto shape e Matte use the third Global Matte input e None calculate the global flicker from the whole image Reference sets the comparison frame to deflicker against e Specified removes flicker from the current frame by com paring it with the frame specified in the Frame parameter e Previous removes flicker from the current frame by com paring it with the previous frame Selecting Previous won t work for distributed renders as it relies on the previous frame being in memory Feedback when the reference method is set to Previous feedback trades off the colour drift against the amount of flicker removed You should try and keep this value as low as possible to remove as much flicker as possible If you re get ting colour drift increase this parameter although doing this will remove less flicker If the Reference method is Specified this parameter will be hidden Source Frame sets the frame from the first Source input that will be used as a reference when comparing the flicker If the Reference method is Previous this parameter will be hidden Roto Matte
125. etween the left and right inpainted sections The Foundry Furnace 226 WIREREMOVAL Bricks Download File wiressarah tar gz Try this shot sarah 0001 tif yourself to see the difference between the reconstruction methods The output of Fur nace has been rendered to sarah 0002 tif and after painting in sarah 0003 tif On this shot of a wire over a brick wall Figure 35 9 we use Figure 35 9 Cropped image of a wire across a brick wall Rolling Repair This would be a classic shot that could be clean plated using information from other frames and then tracked into place However Furnace can be used to repair the wire on the first frame and after tracking the wire rendering with rolling repair switched on will give an excellent result for the sequence Download File wiresbricks tar gz Step by Step 1 Import bricks tif 2 Load F_WireRemoval and select the bricks clip Furnace The Foundry Examples 227 3 Track the wire For the purposes of this example let s use Discreet s tracker Don t worry that the tracker jumps along the wire as long as it s on the wire We can fix Figure 35 10 Track the wire that later Track the wire in 2 places and export the track data Make sure you export the Track X and Track Y data and not the shift or offset Make a note of where you save the data 4 Apply F_WireRemoval to the bricks clip Import the track data to the start and end points as sh
126. ey frame at the current frame as well this may not be what you want so check the curve in the animation sheet as well or make sure you are at the beginning and end of the sequence when pressing the button Complex Search the default search mechanism used in Find Temporal Match is robust and fairly quick for most scenarios In shots where the two clips are very dissimilar i e none of the Source frames can even be approximately overlaid onto the Reference frames due to excessive zooms or perspective changes between the two sequences checking the Complex Search toggle means that all further searches are done using a more sophisticated matching technique Full Retime by default Source frames specified by Source Frame are selected to the nearest whole frame This is OK if you have no motion other than the pan to preserve in the Source Clip But as the plug in is effectively retiming the Source clip you may want to use a full Kronos style retime of the Source to preserve motion more naturally Checking this on also enables the following controls Vector Detail as in Kronos this controls the number of vectors used in the retiming A Vector Detail of 100 will calculate one vector per pixel This will be slow and not necessarily better The default of 20 will calculate one vector for every five pixels in the image generally giving smoother and faster results Furnace The Foundry Parameters 71 Smoothness this
127. fiction Un Ser stand the Sthernece SOLGAR VITAMING SOLGAR Figure 11 6 Bus Bike This should be a straightforward clip to deflicker but an object intrudes into the bottom left corner of the image throwing the calculations off See Figure 11 7 To get round this we can roto off this shape effectively telling F_DeFlicker to ignore this in the calculations Figure 11 7 Motorbike clip showing unwanted object in bot tom left hand corner on frame 8 Download File deflickermotorbike tar gz Furnace The Foundry Examples 91 Step by Step 1 Import motorbike tif and play the clip Note the flicker and the unwanted object in the corner Note also that everything is moving so to deflicker this clip we ll need to drop the Motion Thresh to zero Load F_DeFlicker and select the motorbike clip as all three inputs Reset All the drop the Motion Thresh to zero process the clip and play the result Note the overall flicker Exit play and draw a roto shape around the bottom left hand corner to mask off the object that is upsetting the calculations Invert the matte so we only analyse the white area of the matte and process This should give you a better result The Foundry Furnace 92 DEGRAIN DeGrain Introduction Quick Start This chapter looks at adding grain to an image using the F_DeGrain spark For hints tips tricks and feedback please visit http support thefoundr
128. foot Increase Shutter Samples to 20 to sample more frames and you should get a result as in Figure 20 6 on the next page Furnace The Foundry Examples 141 Figure 20 6 Output image The Foundry Furnace 142 MOTIONMATTE MotionMatte Introduction Quick Start Inputs This chapter looks at the automatic generation of mattes using Furnace s plug in F_MotionMatte For hints tips tricks and feedback please visit http support thefoundry co uk F_MotionMatte uses a combination of The Foundry s advanced motion estimation and auto rotoscoping technology to auto matically segment a foreground object from its background and generate the foreground as a luminance matte with back ground colour fringing removed There is no user input apart from selecting the sequence to segment and in some instances giving a rough idea of the foreground object using the built in roto tools The algorithm used by F_MotionMatte is highly complex and the processing times are very long 30 seconds for a PAL frame would be typical However there are no tuning parameters for the plug in and the proposed work flow is that the artist tries it on a few frames and then if the results look useful background renders the sequence whilst having a cup of tea and a biscuit If the results of the first few frames look unhelpful we suggest you move on and try the other tools in Furnace for assisted rotoscoping such as F ColourMatte and F_Edg
129. from attempting to deblur parts of the image that weren t originally blurred It s also likely that the parts of the foreground will contain similar effects for the same reason In this situation it will be necessary to composite the deblurred foreground out of the sequence and put it over the original background Figure 10 1 Input Figure 10 2 Output Simply apply F_DeBlur to the sequence to be deblurred Position the sampleBox over the region of the image you wish to deblur Initially select a small region as the plug in is computationally intensive and therefore easier to tune using a small region Once you re happy with the results use Use DeBlur Region to process the entire frame For motion blur select set the Blur Furnace The Foundry Inputs 77 Inputs Parameters Type to Motion and set the width of the motion blur using Blur Size For focus blur set Blur Type to Radial and set Blur Size to the diameter of the filter that caused the original blur In both cases the size of the blur is very critical Setting it to be too small will result in not enough blur being removed whilst setting it too big will produce large amounts of ringing and banding on the image For motion blur F DeBlur needs to calculate the direction of the global motion This will be calculated automatically if Calculate Rotation is turned on If Calculate Rotation is off the angle is user specified via the Angle parameter which defaults to
130. from many frames This single frame can then be tracked into place to cover the wires Furnace s wire removal plug in should make the process of wire removal much easier lt is particularly good at removing wires over heavily motion blurred backgrounds or wires over smoke dust or clouds It can be used to remove each wire in a sequence or to quickly create a clean plate which can be tracked into place Most of the algorithms work spatially In other words they reconstruct the background behind the wire only from infor mation in the current frame It takes into account the shape of objects crossing under the wires We have four algorithms to remove wires All our reconstruction methods are unique in that they remove the wire without removing and reapplying the grain They are also tuned to remove long thin objects leaving other objects untouched For example if transient foreground objects cover the wire they will be left untouched in the repair Our four reconstruction methods are e Simple e Gradient e Inpainting e Temporal Inpainting The first three are spatial and the last is temporal The spacial methods get information from adjacent pixels in the current frame They do not require access to other frames in the clip The temporal method takes pixels from both the current frame and adjacent frames The simple method interpolates directly across the wire It is the fastest method and works well when the wire is over Furnace
131. ftware Documentation and or data delivered hereunder are subject to the terms of this Agreement and in no event shall the U S Government acquire greater than RESTRICTED LIMITED RIGHTS At a minimum use duplication or disclosure by the U S Government is subject to the applicable restrictions of i FAR A 52 227 14 ALTS 1 Il and Ill June 1987 ii FAR A 52 227 19 June 1987 iii FAR A 12 211 and 12 212 and or iv DFARS A 227 7202 1 a and DFARS A 227 7202 3 The Software is the subject of the following notices Copyright c 2007 The Foundry Visionmongers Ltd All Rights Reserved Unpublished rights reserved under the Copyright Laws of the United Kingdom Sections 2 4 5 7 8 9 10 11 13 14 15 16 17 18 and 19 shall survive any termination or expiration of this Agreement To the extent that any Software made available hereunder is subject to restrictions upon export and or reexport from the United States Licensee agrees to comply with and not act or fail to act in any way that would violate the applicable inter national national state regional and local laws and regula tions including without limitation the United States Foreign Corrupt Practices Act the Export Administration Act and the Export Administration Regulations as amended or otherwise modified from time to time and neither The Foundry nor Li censee shall be required under this Agreement to act or fail to act in any way which it believes in go
132. g is Penup See Figure 3 2 on the facing page The options are e Preview will only render the image if the Preview but ton is pressed This enables you to tweak parameters without waiting for the plug in to process If you hit the Process button with Process set to Preview the value will be automatically changed to Pen Up so that the clip actually gets processed e Penup will render the image when you release the mouse button or pen e Drag Small will continually render a proxy image as you alter a parameter value e Drag will continually render the whole image as you alter a parameter value Reset Enables the default spark values to be restored Undo and Redo functions are also included in this group See Figure5 on page23 The options are e Reset All will restore default values to all parameters on all pages e Reset Page will restore default values just to the current page Furnace The Foundry Roto Matte Tool 25 Note Roto Matte Tool The Roto Tool Help Tooltip switch Tooltip hints Display Tools Reset Process Figure 3 2 Common Interface Controls e Redo will restore the last parameter change e Undo will remove the effect of the last parameter change The reset buttons will not remove keyframes in the animation curves They will simply restore the default values to the parameters at the current frame This tool is common to several sparks that take a matte input clip lts purpose
133. g the river Thames in to generate moving water London texture Quick Start The spark takes a background image two texture inputs and a matte input The texture inputs will be sampled and used to generate a new texture The background input will have the generated texture applied to it The matte is an optional input that allows you to specify a region in the background image that you wish to fill with the new texture This region can be blended with the original image to produce a seamless fill A roto shape can be used instead of an external matte The Foundry Furnace 48 BLOCKTEXTURE Figure 5 3 The original image is shown on the left This image has recognisable shapes and is more suited to F Blocktexture F BlockTexture has been used to generate the image in the middle which shows good shape retention For comparison F PixelTexture has been used on the right If you have more than one region in the matte only one re gion will be filled with texture Figure 5 4 shows two uncon nected regions in the matte Figure 5 5 shows the output of F BlockTexture Note that only one region has been filled with the brick texture To get round this you would have to split the matte up and apply Blocktexture separately to both mattes then recombine the results Figure 5 4 Unconnected Figure 5 5 Result mattes After connecting the texture inputs use the red rectangular onscreen selection box to define the area that will be
134. ght 129 150 154 Grow 179 High Gain 172 Import Track 136 223 Incremental 38 Invert 31 179 Invert Transform 40 210 Iterations 71 78 133 Left 34 Left Right Top Bottom Src Edge 197 202 Levels 64 Levels Threshold 64 Local Smoothness 126 149 152 Look Ahead Frames 176 Low Gain 172 Luminance Blur 51 160 206 Luminance Correct 177 Luminance Match 51 160 206 Mark Frame 177 Mask 72 Match 38 Match Grade 71 Matte 55 87 126 139 153 186 206 Max Motion 176 Median Width 183 Median Samples 195 Median Size 111 Median Threshold 111 Method 54 Mid Gain 172 Mode 31 128 179 Motion 183 Motion Blending 96 Motion Dilate 96 Motion Smoothing 112 209 Motion Thresh 87 96 Motion Threshold 55 112 N 177 Noise Estimate 78 Number of Samples 51 Original 129 Output 62 78 99 110 118 129 143 164 Overlap 51 216 Passes 135 Path Width 51 206 Perspective 38 57 71 163 177 194 202 210 Plate Size 99 110 Points 183 Position 183 Presets 109 Process Blue Channel 171 Process Green Channel 171 Process Red Channel 171 Reconstruct 221 Red Noise 58 Red Threshold 179 Red Weight 129 150 154 Reference 57 88 Reference Blend 39 Refinement 63 Refine by 63 Region 39 Regularisation 78 Relative Static Frame 38 Remove Amount 160 216 The Foundry Furnace 256 Index Remove Gradient 160 21
135. gion the region of image flagged as having complex motion Source the original frame containing dirt Plate Size the algorithm automatically sets some parame ters depending on the expected size of the dirt which is related to the size of the image As you may be processing a cropped region we do not necessarily know this from the image size Furnace The Foundry Parameters 111 Note Select PAL NTSC 1K 2K or 4K depending on the original size of the scan Dirt Channel sets whether to use the second input to specify the repair region and if so whether to use the luminance or inverted luminance Two dirt detection schemes are used Generally a motion based detection algorithm is sufficient but in regions of complex mo tion this is aided by a spatial detection scheme These parameters have no effect unless aggressionLevel is set to custom Dirt Colour the colour used to highlight the dirt found This parameter is only visible if the output is set to show the dirt Detection Thresh this is the main threshold below which we set a pixel to be dirt and above which we assume it is an image feature Dilate this is the amount by which the pixels detected as dirt are grown to ensure that the whole region of dirt is correctly detected Occasionally we only detect the centre of a piece of dirt and so without dilation we would correct the interior but leave a halo of dirt If this is the case increase dilate u
136. gure 14 5 Improved output Furnace The Foundry 107 DirtRemoval Introduction This chapter looks at the removal of dust and dirt from images using Furnace s plug in F_DirtRemoval For hints tips tricks and feedback please visit http support thefoundry co uk F_DirtRemoval will automatically detect and remove specs of dust and dirt from a frame The plug in works by looking for Figure 15 1 Before Figure 15 2 After objects that appear for only one frame after taking account of the motion in the sequence For example e A spec of dirt that appears for only one frame will be classified as dirt A football being kicked across the image will not be clas sified as dirt because after taking account of motion it appears in each frame of the sequence A vertical scratch in a sequence will not be classified as dirt if it appears in the same place in each frame The scratch repair plug in page 181 should be used to repair the sequence Dirt on the camera lens or in the telecine gate will not be classified as dirt as it appears in the same place on each frame Having detected the location of the dirt the algorithm pro duces a seamless repair by taking motion compensated pixels from the surrounding frames and interpolating them into the dirt region In order to instantly see which regions have been repaired the pixels detected as dirt are marked in red when Output is set to Show Repaired Dirt A matte input m
137. hannel Process Blue Channel switch this on to process the blue channel Response These parameters allow the grain response to be analysed and tuned for each colour channel Gain adjusts the brightness per colour channel of the grain Gain R sets the brightness of the grain in the red channel Gain G sets the brightness of the grain in the green channel The Foundry Furnace 172 REGRAIN Examples Rachael Response Gain B sets the brightness of the grain in the blue channel Low Gain adjusts the gain of the grain in the lowlights Mid Gain adjusts the gain of the grain in the midtones High Gain adjusts the gain of the grain in the highlights Use Sampled Response turn this on to use the response curves Analyse Response press this to update the response curves from the current frame Mutiple presses accumulate the grain response rather than resetting every time Reset Response press this to reset the response curves to their default flat state Response Mix this control is normally set at 100 Drop ping it reduces the effect of the response curves until at 0 the response curves have no effect on the output All the images for the following examples can be downloaded from our web site Download File grain tar gz Use F_DeGrain to remove the grain from the rachael cin image Then using F_ReGrain sample the grain from the original image and reapply it to the degrained
138. hannel of your choice Figure 7 1 Mis aligned Figure 7 2 Aligned Simply apply F_ColourAlign to the image to be aligned Select the reference channel that you wish the other channels to be aligned to and view the result Normally the transformation causing the misalignment can be modelled by a simple translation In more complex situations it may be necessary to calculate rotation scale and perspective changes by activating the relevant controls The quality of the interpolation of the misaligned channels can be modified by adjusting the filtering parameter Low is the quickest but the image may look soft medium uses a bilinear filter and high uses a sinc filter for the best results but at the expense of speed If for some reason the misalignment is only visible in part of the image switching on Use Region and setting the analysis region to that part of the image will force the algorithm to analyse only that part of the image This may give better results Furnace The Foundry Inputs 57 Inputs Parameters F ColourAlign has two inputs the first of which is the sequence to be aligned The second is a reference clip that is used to calculate the transformation that is applied to the first clip This means a denoised version of the input can be used to calculate the transformation to be applied to the original clip The parameters for this plug in are described below Step Size It is rarely necessar
139. hat chang The Foundry Furnace 28 COMMON CONTROLS Figure 3 7 Bin Trash to delete control points ing one will not change the other Use these to get sharp corners 2 Linked Tangents drawn with solid lines and solid circular ends paired tangents point 180 degrees away from each other dragging one tangent will change the angle but not the length of the other tangent so that is always 180 degrees away 3 Automatic Tangents drawn with dashed lines and hollow circular ends paired tangents point 180 degrees away from each other there is no user control over these tangents the length and angle of the tangents are auto matically calculated to make a smooth curve by looking at the position of nearby control points Moving any of these control points will change the tangent To change the tangent type you quickly click on the tangent end without moving it The tangent will then cycle between the various types If you have an automatic tangent and you drag it it will always turn into a linked tangent otherwise you couldn t move it Rotation Animation and Timeline The roto shape can animate saving the whole shape at each key points tangents and tangent types For frames where there are no keys a shape will be interpolated using the sur rounding two keyframes Furnace The Foundry Roto Matte Tool 29 If the roto has any animation the outline will be drawn solid if there is a key at the curr
140. he amount of the blend between the current reference image and the output Slip Source allows you to offset the Source clip when doing Relative matches Slip Reference allows you to offset the Reference clip when doing Relative matches Step Size it is rarely necessary to find the optimum trans formation for all pixels and so to speed up the process the image is sampled with a frequency of Step Size and only these pixels are used to find the transformation Decreasing step size will increase both the processing time and the quality of result Scale Transform when the Source is transformed to produce the output you can modify the amount of the transform applied by using this control A value of 0 will not transform the Source at all This control can be useful if you wish to match the motion of a foreground object so that it only partially reacts to the background The Foundry Furnace 40 ALIGN Roto Mask DataOut Crops Examples Clean Area Alignment Invert Transform if you wish to match move a Source clip with no camera move to match the motion in the Reference clip then you will need to invert the transform applied to the Source so that it shows the motion required to destablise the Reference rather than the motion used to stabilise it See the example on page 43 See Roto Matte Tool on page on page 25 These parameters store the motionderived transform for the image sequence With Analyse
141. he number the better the matte it will produce but the longer the processing time Edge Error Weight how strictly edges in the alpha must cor respond to edges in the input Use Known Background uses the fourth input to help the algorithm produce a better matte The fourth input must be a clean plate Matte Optimiser If you are working at film resolution with rough mattes F_ColourMatte will take ages processing You can compensate for this by us ing the Levels and Level Threshold parameters The Foundry Furnace 64 COLOURMATTE Crops Examples Belle Levels if the known foreground and background mattes are quite loose it is possible to use the matte optimiser to try and refine these mattes before the algorithm spends a large amount of time calculating the matte This is achieved by running a number of crude passes of the algorithm that attempt to shrink the region of unknown alpha The valid range for this parameter depends on the size of the images See the table below for the valid range of Levels for common image sizes Image Size Levels PAL NTSC 1 1K 1 2 2K 1 3 4K 1 4 So for example if you have a 2048x1556 image the valid range for Levels is 13 If you have loose mattes then set levels to 3 as this should dramatically speed up the rendering If you have tight mattes then just leave Levels set to 1 Levels Threshold this is designed to speed up processing by shri
142. hese wires need to be digitally removed There are many ways Figure 35 1 Cropped image of a wire across a brick wall of doing this including painting the wires out frame by frame and replacing large parts of the background to cover the wires The method used depends on the type of image under the wire Furnace is particularly good at replacing the painting method but it also includes tools to assist in clean plating when new backgrounds have to be tracked into place The use of clean plates in wire removal is very common and gives good results in certain situations Consider a scene shot with an actor suspended from wires and then the same scene shot again without the actor This second sequence is called the clean plate The wires from the first shot The Foundry Furnace 218 WIREREMOVAL Furnace Reconstruction Methods can be painted out using pixels from the clean plate leaving the actor suspended in thin air Shooting a clean plate if the camera is locked off is easy If the camera moves then motion control rigs can be used to exactly reproduce the first pass But it doesn t always work particularly if the scene is shot against backgrounds that don t look the same on the second pass for example clouds sky smoke Motion control rigs are also expensive and that makes them a rarity Often a clean plate is not shot during the filming and the compositor is left to create one by merging together unobstructed pixels
143. ided free to the end user Fixed Bugs 1 There was a bug on 64 bit Linux systems that could cause all of the Furnace plug ins to crash This has been fixed Known Bugs amp Workarounds 1 F_Kronos BUG ID 609 when applied with timing method set to speed and speed set to 100 results in an offset of 1 frame between input and output As a aworkaround apply with method set to frame and keyframe 1 on the first frame and the final frame on the final frame 2 F_WireRemoval BUG ID 451 shearing on the repair is visible on shallow wires that go off screen bottom or left but only if the sinc filtering is switched on The Foundry Furnace 230 APPENDIX A Furnace 3 0v6 Furnace 3 0v5 This is a maintenance release of Furnace on Autodesk IFFFS products Release Date 20 November 2008 Requirements Flame Flint Fire Inferno or Smoke Flame 8 5 on Irix32 Flame 9 5 on Irix64 Flint 9 0 9 5 2007 2008 2009 on Linux32 Flame 9 5 2007 2008 2009 on Linux64 and Burn 2 0 2007 have been tested Foundry FLEXIm Tools FFT 4 0v8 or later for floating license support New Features There are no new features Improvements There are no improvements to existing features Fixed Bugs 1 12 Bit processing caused frequent crashes This has been fixed Known Bugs amp Workarounds 1 F_Kronos BUGID 609 when applied with timing method set to speed and speed set to 100 results in an offset of 1 frame between in
144. ilisa tion can be inverted and applied to another clip to do a match move See MatchMoving on page 43 Multiple Pass Alignment two camera passes across the same scene can be locked together by aligning each frame in one clip with its corresponding frame in the sec ond clip This is very useful for locking the clips together Furnace The Foundry Quick Start 37 Quick Start Inputs Parameters Align where a motion control shot has proved defective or where the original passes were not motioncontrolled at all See Multiple Pass Alignment on page 72 e Clean Area Alignment on a long pan following a fore ground object we can align an image a few frames before the current one into position on the current frame to provide a quick clean area for replacing the foreground object See Clean Area Alignment on page 40 To align one clip with a static frame from the same clip load the Spark using the clip as all three inputs and hit process If the motion in the clip eventually deviates too far from the initial frame we are using as a reference the match will start to fail See the description of the Incremental button below for a solution F_Align has three inputs The first input Source will be the sequence which is transformed and output during processing The second input Reference is the clip we derive motion from either by matching frames from the Source against the refer ence or by matching frames in
145. ill be used in Discreet s keyer to generate a matte Note that the movement of Mike s head is a bit subtle Dow nload File edgemattemike tar gz Step 1 2 by Step Import the clip Mike tif Load the F_EdgeMatte spark and click on Mike as the only input Reset All On frame 1 roughly draw round Mike s head as shown in Figure 16 16 Adjust the points if the edge shown in pink doesn t quite match the edge The Foundry Furnace 120 EDGEMATTE Figure 16 16 Step 4 1 Go to frame 10 Note that Mike s head has shifted po sition slightly Figure 16 17 Move the shape using the red cross hairs and adjust individual points if the outline has changed shape as well as position Figure 16 18 Figure 16 17 Frame 10 Figure 16 18 Move shape Press the Snap Roto to Edge button to get the output edge roto to follow the edge This sets a keyframe too Figure 16 18 Goto frame 20 and repeat the process Press the Export as RAW button to save the rotospline in the directory usr discreet path Exit the spark Apply Discreet s keyer to the same clip of Mike and load in the saved rotospline as a mask This can then be edited if required and a matte rendered Furnace The Foundry Examples 121 Figure 16 19 Frame 20 Figure 16 20 Move shape The Foundry Furnace 122 KRONOS Kronos Introduction Quick Start Speed Note Kronos is Furnace
146. image Compare the results Use a black and white linear ramp as the first input and rachael as the second input Switch Use Sampled Response on click Analyse Response and view the result Note how the grain is varied across the luminance values Furnace The Foundry 173 RigRemoval Introduction Quick Start This chapter looks at the removal of unwanted objects rigs from image sequences without accurate rotoscoping or keying For hints tips tricks and feedback please visit http support thefoundry co uk Figure 27 1 Before with taxi Figure 27 2 After applying RigRemoval In this context we define a rig as a foreground element in a sequence that moves over a background element The spark will only work satisfactorily if it is possible to model the back ground motion by a global 3d transform For example if the background contains multiple objects moving in different direc tions the results will be poor Typically good results will only be achieved under the same circumstances that a skilled artist could generate and track in a clean plate in order to repair the sequence However this spark should make the process quicker and easier The rig removal algorithm works by estimating the background motion between successive frames ignoring the foreground object and then using the motion information to look forward and backward in the sequence to find the correct piece of background to fill in the missing r
147. into the output plate e Blend mix the frames together weighted by the value of weight e Limit Blend mixes the frames together ensuring later frames do not overwrite earlier ones e Median combines the frames using a median filter to remove local foreground objects moving independently of the background e Limit Median combines the frames using a median filter ensuring later frames do not overwrite earlier ones Median Samples the number of frames used by the median filter in Frame Combiner Weight the weighting given to each frame before it is com bined with the output plate e Flat a uniform weight in which all pixels are added equally Figure 30 5 on the following page e Centre a weight specified by a Gaussian distribution The pixels in the centre are weighted more than those at the edges Figure 30 5 on the next page The Foundry Furnace 196 SMARTPLATE wal i 4 Figure 30 4 Left image is Median and right image is Blend e Extreme Centre a weight specified by a Gaussian dis tribution with a smaller standard deviation The pixels at the centre are weighted much more than those at the edges imm i a pd Figure 30 5 Left image uses centre weighting and the right flat weighting Filter sets the filter type used for the pixel interpolation e Box low quality but quick e Gaussian higher quality but slower than box e Sinc highest quality giving sharp images but slower th
148. ion a pixel moves when going from frame 1 to frame 2 and is shown in red whereas a backwards vector estimates the direction from frame 2 to frame 1 and is shown in blue Vectors have both magnitude and a direction These vectors cannot be edited Correct Luminance corrects for luminance changes in the sequence before calculating the vectors and should result in more accurate vectors on sequences with large luminance vari ations Error Threshold sets the pixel difference beneath which mo tion is ignored For example if the image was very grainy the algorithm might try and estimate the motion of the grain be tween frames Increasing Error Threshold would stop this Block Size adjusts the size of the data blocks used to calcu late the vectors Varying the Block Size will cause the motion estimation to lock on to different parts of the image Filtering sets the quality of filtering used to build the re paired frame e Normal this uses a bilinear interpolation This is quicker to render e Extreme this uses a sinc interpolation filter It s slower than the bilinear interpolation but produces sharper im ages and should be used in the final render By default we analyse motion based on the luminance of the image Specifically this is a weighted average of the red green and blue channels However we can bias this using the red green and blue Weight parameters For example if we set the red and green weight parameters t
149. is only in one of the corners in the static background For most other circumstances choose Previous For example if the camera is panning then everything is moving Now process the clip using the defaults and look at the result If the Reference method was set to Previous you may see a drift in the mean luminance value during the render You can Furnace The Foundry Quick Start 85 Tuning correct for this by increasing the Feedback however this will decrease the amount of flicker removed If the sequence still flickers there are one or two changes you can make to try to improve the result To put this in context it s worth explaining a little more about the algorithm Our deflicker fits a block based model to the image We split the source and reference images into multiple blocks of size Block Size We then try and modify the brightness and contrast the flicker parameters of the source block to make it equal to the brightness and contrast of the reference block In practise if there is motion in the sequence the pixels in the two blocks will not be the same which will result in incorrect flicker parameters To minimize this effect when the image is divided into blocks they are overlapped by a small region To this region we apply the flicker parameters calculated for both adjacent blocks If the results from these two deflickers are not consistent we assume that the parameters have been calculated incorrectly due
150. is the main control for the plug in which trades off the amount of dirt detected and repaired verses the number of false detections and incorrect repairs Figure 15 3 Presets Very Figure 15 4 Presets Very Low High Archive footage should typically set to Very High whereas a modern scan with isolated patches of dust should be set to Low or Medium e Very Low detectionThreshold 2 dilate 1 changeTh reshold 1 safetyFactor 20 medianSize 11 medi anThreshold 25 dirtRejectThreshold 10 complexMo tionThreshold 50 complexMotionSmoothing 200 e Low detectionThreshold 1 5 dilate 1 changeTh reshold 1 safetyFactor 10 medianSize 11 medi anThreshold 15 dirtRejectThreshold 7 5 complexMo tionThreshold 80 complexMotionSmoothing 150 e Medium detectionThreshold 1 dilate 1 changeTh reshold 1 safetyFactor 5 medianSize 11 medi anThreshold 5 dirtRejectThreshold 5 complexMotion Threshold 90 complexMotionSmoothing 150 e High detectionThreshold 0 75 dilate 1 changeTh reshold 0 75 safetyFactor 3 5 medianSize 11 me dianThreshold 4 dirtRejectThreshold 5 complexMo tionThreshold 100 complexMotionSmoothing 150 The Foundry Furnace 110 DIRTREMOVAL Very High detectionThreshold 0 5 dilate 1 changeTh reshold 0 5 safetyFactor 2 medianSize 11 medi anThreshold 3 dirtRejectThreshold 5 complexMotion Threshold 100 complexMotionSmoothing 150
151. l roto on the image Only pixels in the roto will be degrained These controls control the repair matte See Roto Matte con trols on page 25 The corner warp applied to warp the patch into place When Analyse is off you can change these by hand to correct the algorithm This section should be used in conjunction with the example images which can be downloaded from our web site In this example we will be tracking a repair onto a moving table Note that for tracking we are only going to rely upon the detail on the surface of the table itself F PlanarPatcher can track this texture without requiring any other valid tracking points Step by step 1 Import the Table jpog patch 0001 tif and patch Matte 000 1 tif Furnace The Foundry Example 165 Figure 25 1 Textured wood table 2 Apply F_PlanarPatcher using Table tif as Source and Tracking Mask patch as the Repair and patchMatte as the Repair Matte 3 Draw a roto around the table surface for tracking It s this roto that is auto updated when Auto Key Frame Roto is on Below is an example from frame 40 from the orig inal patch shown in Figure 25 1 we ve repaired Figure 25 2 to give Figure 25 3 Figure 25 2 Input Figure 25 3 Output 4 Process this clip and you ll see the roto updating as well as the repair being tracked and composited into place It s also worth looking at the warped output and warped matte You could process th
152. late required and pad the outside F SmartPlate is then applied to this larger clip The method used to combine frames is best understood by considering that each frame has an alpha channel associated with it The shape of the alpha channel is defined by weight which can either be Flat a uniform value over the whole frame Centre a Gaussian distribution positioned on the centre of the frame or Extreme Centre a Gaussian distribution with a much faster falloff positioned on the centre of the frame Pixels from each new frame are then added on to the clean plate weighted by weight Frame Combiner chooses between a number of different op tions as to how to combine the frames Blend simply blends every overlapping pixel in the frame with the corresponding pixel in the output plate Limit Blend blends the pixels in a similar way but stops blending frames when the alpha of the output reaches 1 This is to ensure that later frames don t overwrite earlier ones For example assume that a particular pixel is visible in a number of frames after weighing with a Gaussian weight the alpha value of the pixel may be 0 2 0 5 0 8 1 1 1 over frames 16 Only pixels in frames 13 would be used to build the output Rather than averaging the pixels together to form the output it is also possible to combine them with a median filter by choosing the Median option This has the effect of removing locally moving foreground objects from the plate Again Limit
153. ls this control shrinks the edges of the transformed Source to remove any unwanted edges pixels in the composite All the images for the following examples can be downloaded from our web site You can contrast this treatment with a similar example using the same clips in the F_Align chapter We will take two hand held pans of a woman standing in front of a New York backdrop The pan is similar in both clips but the woman is standing in one and kneeling in the other We will use F_Correlate to line up the clips and with a split screen we ll produce a single panning clip of the two women as though we d filmed twins Furnace The Foundry Examples 73 i f f Figure 9 2 Top woman standing Bottom woman kneeling Download Files alignbelleleft tar gz alignbellecentre tar gz Step by Step 1 Import the BelleLeft tif and BelleCentre tif frames and play both Note that they are both similar handheld camera moves over the same background The woman in the foreground is standing in a different position in both clips and while the pan is similar it is not exactly the same 2 Load F_Correlate into a Sparks button and click on Bel leLeft BelleCentre BelleCentre the last clip is usually the RefMask but we can use any clip for this example 3 Reset the plug in using Reset All 4 Go to frame 1 5 Make sure that the timeline is 100 frames long this is the length of the Reference clip BellCentre 6
154. ly takes a bit of trial and error but can save you the bother Set Start X Point to 450 and Start Y Point to 1200 7 Goto frame 1 and render the clip 8 Exit the spark 9 The last frame of the clip rendered is the full plate gen erated Furnace The Foundry Examples 199 Liberty Banner In this example we will take the large plate created in the previous example and paint on it Then we ll put the camera move back to create a clip with a camera move E nia ss x ALLLLULLTE is Figure 30 9 Banner painted on output from F_SmartPlate Step by Step 1 Ina paint package draw a banner over the image as shown in Figure 30 9 If you prefer you can skip this stage and use the one made called libertybanner 0050 tif in the download file 2 Apply F_SmartPlate to the original liberty clip for the first input and the painted frame as the second input 3 Switch Generate to Use Full Plate and render 4 That s it The Foundry Furnace 200 SMARTZOOM SmartZoom Introduction This chapter looks at super resolution using Furnace s plug in F_SmartZoom For hints tips tricks and feedback please visit http support thefoundry co uk F_SmartZoom takes a sequence of different views of the same object and uses them to make a single image of higher resolu tion than any of the original views Figure 31 1 F_SmartZoom has been used to enlarge the im age Given a number of different views
155. m a standard film stock only the first Source input is used and the stock selected from the stock parameter list 2K 4K aperture corrected and non aperture corrected stocks are included Individual colour channels can be selected and adjusted using the Process Channel controls In its default setting F ReGrain adds the same amount of grain over the whole image but the amount of grain on an image is normally a function of luminance The controls on the Response page allow the amount of grain to be adjusted depending on the luminance of the individual colour channels of the Source The spark performs an automatic analysis of the current frame when you click the Analyse Response button A small graph Figure 26 6 showing the response curves is drawn on the right of the screen You can move to a number of different frames and repeat the analysis the results accumulate to give a finer luminance match to your footage Figure 26 6 F_ReGrain interface showing Reponse Curves You can also modify the response using the Gain controls If you prefer you can switch off Use Sampled Response and select grain from lowlights midtones and highlights in separate process and then combine them using a luminance matte The sampled grain from the different luminances of the same image will differ Furnace The Foundry Quick Start 169 Checking the Result Proxy Resolutions To test that the new grain is the same as the old grain y
156. make sure that it is correctly detecting motion Click on Show Motion Map and adjust Motion Thresh Blur Size and Smoothing until the map correctly shows the areas of motion in the sequence These should be set cautiously to avoid any artifacts such as blurring White areas in the motion map are areas that are moving as as such will be degrained spacially Black areas in the motion map are areas that are not moving and will be degrained by blending from other frames Inputs F DeGrain has one input source that is the image to be de grained Parameters The parameters for this spark are described below Furnace The Foundry Parameters 95 DeGrain Analysis Frame This is a read only control to show which frame the analysis is taking place at If we re at the frame the grain sample widget will be blue otherwise it ll be red Tune this is the coarse adjustment control Increasing tune will remove more grain and decreasing it will leave more in Tune Red increases or decreases the amount of grain re moved in the red channel Tune Green increases or decreases the amount of grain re moved in the green channel Tune Blue increases or decreases the amount of grain re moved in the blue channel Detail sets which of the frequencies to process In other words you can remove and process only the large scale grain leaving the others untouched However normally you would remove grain throughout the frequency spec
157. mation Translate switch this on to correct for translational changes in the transformation Perspective switch this on to correct for perspective changes in the transformation Furnace The Foundry Parameters 39 Region a mask can be used to indicate the area of the image to use during matching For example you may wish to con centrate only on a moving foreground object and ignore the background The area ignored is where the mask is black e Mask use the Ref Mask input clip e Roto use the embedded Roto tool to produce a mask e All use the all of the frame Filter is used to control the quality of your processed images by reducing the jagged lines characteristic of pixel devices To render high quality images you should switch filtering on With all image processing you have a trade off between quality and time Filtering will increase the quality of your image but will also increase the time it takes to process the image e High sinc filtering gives excellent results but is slower to render than the others e Medium bilinear filtering e Low point sampling can give poor results but is faster to process Show Reference it can be useful to quickly view the actual image that is being used as the reference to match to on the current frame Switching this on will show the reference image blended with the current output Reference Blend when Show Reference is switched on this controls t
158. minance corrects for luminance changes in the sequence before calculating the vectors and should result in more accurate vectors on sequences with large luminance vari ations Error Threshold sets the pixel difference beneath which mo tion is ignored For example if the image was very grainy the algorithm might try and estimate the motion of the grain be tween frames Increasing Error Threshold would stop this Block Size adjusts the size of the data blocks used to calcu late the vectors Varying the Block Size will cause the motion estimation to lock on to different parts of the image Filtering sets the quality of filtering used to build the re paired frame e Normal this uses a bilinear interpolation This is quicker to render e Extreme this uses a sinc interpolation filter It s slower The Foundry Furnace 154 MOTIONSMOOTH than the bilinear interpolation but produces sharper im ages and should be used in the final render By default we analyse motion based on the luminance of the image Specifically this is a weighted average of the red green and blue channels However we can bias this using the red green and blue Weight parameters For example if we set the red and green weight parameters to zero we will only look for motion in the blue channel Red Weight sets the contribution the red channel will make in the calculation of the motion vectors Green Weight sets the contribution
159. minology The Kronos retimer in the Furnace toolset uses motion analysis to do speeding up and slowing down of image sequences There are many reasons why it may be useful to extract the results of the motion analysis separately without retiming a sequence This may be because you wish to store the motion analysis results for a low resolution sequence you have client approval for and then reload and rescale them for the final rendering without the expense of calculating them all again You may wish to apply the motion fields from one sequence to a different one or may wish to use the motion thresholded as an input pass to some other image processing technique A word of warning don t get too excited Motion estimation is a tricky business at best It is unlikely that you will be able to use any of these results to for example automatically rotoscope a moving lioness against a herd of wildebeast The technology in Kronos is world class but we have a significant way to go before we get to tackle wildebeast This appendix is purely here to give those of you that are Curious a little more information Most compositors will be able to skip this section without loosing sleep Kronos works by producing a new artificial frame or inbetween between two original frames The first of these two original frames we call O and the second we call il The amount of the blend from iO to ilwe call delta As an example if we are producing a new frame a
160. n moving the input roto hasn t automatically adjusted the output edge roto To do this you need to press the Snap Roto To Edge button the results of which are shown in Figure 16 5 Advance a few more frames and repeat this process When you are happy with the pink edge over the clip consider the output edge roto The number of curves in the edge roto can be adjusted using segments Increase segments to get a closer fit to the edge The Foundry Furnace 116 EDGEMATTE Tip Figure 16 4 More input roto Figure 16 5 Press Snap Roto to Edge Now render a matte or export the edge roto as RAW format for use elsewhere When rotoing complex shapes it is often best to divide the shape into smaller overlapping shapes and roto those These mattes can be combined together later and give more flexibility if some parts are more difficult to roto than others Inputs F_EdgeMatte has one input the source which is the clip to be rotoed Parameters The parameters for this plug in are described below The but tons are grouped into columns The left column is for the input roto controls The middle column is for the edge controls The right column for the output edge roto controls EdgeMatte Roto Show Roto switch this on to show the input roto Roto Colour sets the colour of the input roto on the screen Snap Roto to Edge moves the output edge roto to fit the edge and sets a key Edge Show Edge switch this on to show
161. n Cache 38 210 Clip High 104 Clip Low 104 Clip Max 32 Clip Min 32 Colour 32 34 179 Colour Selection 63 254 Comp Size 72 Comp Softness 72 Compare 171 Compare With 171 Complex Search 70 Composite Ref 72 Correct Luminance 127 150 153 Create All Keys 136 Create Key 136 Crops 88 Curved Wire 223 De spot 179 DeBlur Region 79 Delete All Keys 136 Delete Animation 33 Delete Key 136 Delete Roto 33 Delete Roto Key 33 Detail 95 Detail Length 221 Detection Thresh 111 Dilate 111 Direction 178 Dirt 111 Dirt Channel 111 Dirt Reject Thresh 111 Edges 31 Edge Blend 51 206 Edge Colour 116 Edge Error Weight 63 Edge Freedom 117 Edge Push 32 Edge Roto Colour 118 Error Threshold 127 150 153 202 Exaggerate Bias 161 Exaggerate Grain 96 Exaggerate Noise 99 Export 118 Export Roto Raw 136 Fail Marker Alpha 178 Feedback 88 Fill 50 159 Fill Output X 216 Index 255 Fill Output Y 216 Filter 39 71 196 202 209 Filtering 57 127 150 153 163 177 Find Temporal Match 69 Fit To 195 Foreground Region 143 Frame 37 125 Frame Combiner 195 Frame Step 194 Full Retime 70 Gain 171 Gain B 172 Gain G 171 Gain R 171 Generate 194 Generate Final Plate 195 Generate Final Zoom 202 Global Smoothness 126 149 152 Gradient Factor 183 Gradient Factor 222 Grain Frame 171 Green Noise 58 Green Threshold 179 Green Wei
162. n are described below Set Single Frame Bad sets valid at the current frame to false and true the frames either side unless they have already been set to false as well Valid Frame use this to mark good and bad frames Set Valid Frame to O for a bad frame that needs replacing Good frames should be marked as Valid Frame 1 You Il need to set enough keys to define a curve for the whole clip Vector Detail defines the amount of detail in the motion vectors The maximum value of 100 will generate one vector per pixel This will produce the most accurate vectors but will take longer to render Global Smoothness sets the smoothness of the vectors for the coarse motion Local Smoothness sets the smoothness of the vectors for the local motion Smoothing Iterations sets the number of times the vectors are combed to bring rogue vectors into line A larger value will produce smoother more consistent results but will take longer to render Build From One Image switch this on to build the missing frame from a single valid frame This will result in a sharper image but more jerky motion Show Vectors switch this on to display the motion vectors over the image A motion vector is the estimated direction a pixel will move between two frames say frame 1 and frame 2 Motion vectors are used to build frames between frame 1 and The Foundry Furnace 150 MOTIONREPAIR 2 A forward motion vector is the estimated direct
163. n onscreen when Display is set to Full Image Widget The size and position of this box can be al tered using the onscreen tools or by changing the following parameters Sample Left the left position of sample region Sample Right the right position of sample region Sample Top the top position of sample region Sample Bottom the bottom position of sample region The Foundry Furnace 36 ALIGN Align Introduction This chapter looks into using F_Align for matchmoving stabil isation and alignment For hints tips tricks and feedback please visit http support thefoundry co uk F_Align is arguably one of the most powerful sparks within Furnace as it has so many possible applications In its most basic form the spark aligns a source image with a reference image by applying a global transformation to the source im age This transformation is able to take account of changes in translation rotation scale and perspective between the im ages This is achieved without the artist needing to manually Figure 4 1 F_Align used to matchmove two clips into one select tracking points Some of the applications for this motion analysis are e Stabilisation each frame in a sequence can be aligned with a single reference frame For a stabilisation tech nique that preserves the original camera pan see both F_Steadiness on page 208 and Stabilisation on page 44 e MatchMoving the data calculated to do the stab
164. n the roto used Figure 32 2 Resulting texture The Foundry Furnace 208 STEADINESS Steadiness Introduction Quick Start This chapter looks into removing camera shake from clips F Steadiness smooths out wobble whereas F_Align can be used to lock down a shot to a particular frame For hints tips tricks and feedback please visit http support thefoundry co uk F Steadiness analyses a clip and applies a global transfor mation to reduce translation rotation scale and perspective changes to smooth out camera shake Figure 33 1 F_Steadiness interface Steadiness analyses the motion in the scene without requiring the user to specify tracking points in the sequence This is useful where tracking data is unreliable or where good data is available but moves out of shot during the clip F Steadiness is very simple to use Load the Spark and select a clip from the reels The part of the clip near the current timeline position is first analysed Be patient Once this is done simply process and play the result If you think the sequence requires it switch on Scale or Per spective and process again With these options checked the processing time increases as F Steadiness computes more complex transforms to match the motion in the shot Furnace The Foundry Replacing Camera Shake 209 Replacing Camera Shake Inputs Parameters Steady Once the sequence has been analysed you can switch An
165. nace 58 COLOURALIGN Red Noise median size used to denoise the red channel in ternally Noise can sometimes cause incorrect results in chan nel registration this median is applied to a reference clip so that the output will not have the median applied Green Noise median size used to denoise the green channel internally Blue Noise median size used to denoise the blue channel internally Crops See Crops on page 33 Examples BelleColourAlign 1 Import BelleColourAlign jpg and apply F_ColourAlign The result is poor on the default settings as in Figure 7 3 but we can fix that Figure 7 3 Poor result caused by noise in the blue channel 2 Look at the blue channel there is a large amount of noise preventing the it from from aligning Set the Blue Noise parameter to 1 in order to get rid of some of this noise and you should get a result as in Figure 7 4 If you want to use an external noise rejection algorithm simply process the clip with that spark and use that as the second input Furnace The Foundry Examples 59 Figure 7 4 Better result after reducing the blue noise The Foundry Furnace 60 COLOURMATTE ColourMatte Introduction This chapter looks at keying off arbitrary backgrounds using Furnace s plug in F_ColourMatte For hints tips tricks and feedback please visit http support thefoundry co uk F_Colourmatte is designed to help an artist paint a matte of
166. nded to appear in the regions defined by the pink areas in the bias matte and the green background tended to appear in the green regions See Figure 24 3 on the fol lowing page For hints tips tricks and feedback please visit http support thefoundry co uk The Foundry Furnace 156 PIXELTEXTURE s Hz vor w es bas x Tide Woe whe i Figure 24 3 Sample Texture Bias Matte Generated Texture Quick Start Creating Textures To create a full screen texture from an image click on F_PixelTexture You are required to select 4 inputs Just use the same image for all inputs Figure 24 4 shows a small 192x192 pixel tex ture padded to 720x576 using Resize Select a destination reel In the PixelTexture spark select Reset All to ensure that Full Screen Widget and Fill Screen are on Switch View to Source and position the red onscreen rectangle over part of the texture you want to replicate Switch View to Result Figure 24 5 Figure 24 4 Small sample Figure 24 5 Large generated texture texture The size of the generated texture is taken from the image size of the source input To create a large area of texture from a small sample image first Resize the texture then ap ply F_PixelTexture See Large textures from small images on page 214 Furnace The Foundry Quick Start 157 Repairing Images Load F PixelTexture and from the reels select an image you want to repair with a texture Figure 24
167. nking the unknown region faster Any pixel with an alpha value within Levels Threshold of O and 100 is set to O and 100 You should also be aware that although this is similar to a clip min and max parameter acting on the final matte it does give a subtly different result See Crops on on page 33 All the images for the following examples can be downloaded from our web site This is a very tricky shot Don t expect a perfect result or you ll be disappointed We re going to try and extract the woman Figure 8 5 from the background To do this we need to draw a very rough matte of the pixels we know to be foreground Figure 8 6 and those that we know are in the background Figure 8 7 The more accurate you are with these mattes the quicker ColourMatte will process and the better your results But hey this is meant to save you time so try a rough roto first The fourth input is a clean plate In the unlikely event you have a clean plate loading it in and using it will dramatically improve your results Of course if you had Furnace The Foundry Examples Figure 8 5 Source Figure 8 6 Foreground Matte a clean plate you might be tempted to extract the foreground with a difference process Figure 8 7 Background Matte Figure 8 8 Clean Plate On the defaults you ll get the matte shown in Figure 8 9 This matte is going to need a bit of work before it s useful Tinder s Dilate spark can be used to clip the white
168. ns little or no significant foreground motion Large moving foreground objects will adversely affect the reconstruction of the background plate Quick Start Resize your video resolution clip to HD or film resolution padding the outside Apply F SmartPlate using this clip as all the inputs View the Source and position the red rectan gle over the whole source but not the black padding View the Result and play Note that a large output plate should be progressively built up Note To get a single image large clean plate you have to render the whole sequence then throw away all but the last frame or use the Generate Final Plate button You ll need to experiment with the position of the Start Point so that the output plate fills the image space available A certain amount of trial and error will be required If the sequence contains significant zooms or perspective changes turn on Scale or Perspective respectively for better results Try experimenting with the ways the frames are combined to gether using Frame Combiner To remove locally moving ob jects select the Median option If the sequence folds back on itself and you need the later frames to stitch on to the beginning of the sequence set Fit To to Current Plate The Foundry Furnace 194 SMARTPLATE Inputs Parameters Plate F SmartPlate has three inputs the sequence from which the plate is to be made and an optional second input the full plate from which th
169. nt pixel site The colours that best fit the compositing equation whilst ensuring some form of smoothness to the foreground background and alpha are chosen These are then forced to fit the compositing equation and the process repeated in an itera tive manner Hence it should be noted that if a colour close to the correct foreground and background do not exist anywhere nearby in the known foreground and background regions the algorithm is likely to fail If a clean background plate is available this can be optionally supplied as an input In this case the number of unknowns are reduced dramatically leading to better results but it is impor tant that the background plate is almost identical in colour and alignment to the background of the source image The outputs of the plug in are the unpremultiplied foreground F the alpha a and optionally the unpremultiplied back ground B Providing F and alpha separately means it is a trivial matter to composite the foreground into a different picture Figure 8 4 Generate a matte of the region in the source image that is defi nitely foreground white Similarly create a matte of the region that is definitely background alpha 0 Load F_ColourMatte into a sparks button and click on the original image then the foreground matte then background matte Try different Colour Selection and Refinement algorithms to improve the results Also try increasing the number of Refine ment passes
170. ntil the whole of the dirt is removed Change Thresh after repairing the dirt the repaired pixels are compared with the original pixels If they differ by less than Change Thresh it is assumed that they were incorrectly flagged as dirt and replaced with the original pixels Safety Factor in the regions of complex motion we need to be more cautious about detecting dirt based on motion So rather than using the detectionThreshold used in the other regions we scale it by safetyFactor to be extra cautious Median Size as well as using motion to detect dirt in regions of complex motion we additionally add a spatial check This is based on filtering the image with a median filter to remove objects below a certain size MedianSize sets the size of this median filter Making it too large will increase computation time and falsely detect image objects as dirt too small and dirt will be missed Median Threshold after median filtering pixels that differ by more than medianThreshold are flagged as dirt by the spatial detector Dirt Reject Thresh for any region of dirt flagged by the mo tion detector if the percentage of pixels flagged as dirt by the spatial detector is over dirtRejectThreshold then the region is assumed to be dirt The Foundry Furnace 112 DIRTREMOVAL Crops Examples Roller blades Where complex motion exists in the sequence it is likely that the motion based dirt detection scheme will fail A com
171. o minimise this effect when the image is divided into blocks they are overlapped by a small region To this region we apply the statistics calculated for both adjacent blocks If the results from these two blocks are not consistent we assume that the parameters have been cal culated incorrectly due to motion and we discard them both replacing them with the global statistics for the whole dam aged region The criterion for discarding parameters is set by Motion Threshold So if you think the damage is only in parts of the image that are static it is quite safe to increase this value If there is little information in the block for example in a plain area it is difficult to obtain reliable estimates for the statistics We check for this by discarding the parameters for any blocks with a variance below Weight Thresh Hav ing obtained a reliable set of parameters for each block these are then smoothed using a combing technique The number of smoothing iterations is set by Smoothness Load the plug in and click on the damaged clip for the three inputs Set Repair Channel to the damaged channel in need of fixing and set Use Channel to an undamaged channel Set the Method to blend If a spatial only repair is not satisfac tory further improvements may be obtained by using motion interpolation Turn on Use Motion and move to frame 1 of the sequence Render out the sequence The Foundry Furnace 54 CHANNELREPAIR Inputs Paramet
172. o or Smoke Flame 9 5 9 0 8 5 on Irix Flint 9 0 on Linux 32 Flame 9 0 on Linux 64 and Burn 1 5 and 2 0 have been tested New Features 1 2 F ScratchRepair repairs scratches F ChannelRepair repairs defects in one colour channel using information from undamaged colour channels F DirtRemoval scans frames for dirt using motion esti mation highlights the dirt and repairs it F ColourMatte creates mattes of arbitrary foregrounds over backgrounds without using blue screens F_EdgeMatte roto assist tool that snaps splines to edges F_MotionRepair recreates damages frames using motion estimation technology Furnace The Foundry Release Notes 237 7 F_MotionSmooth uses motion estimation and a 3way me dian filter to rebuild all frames in a clip This process is good at cleaning up temporally changing artefacts 8 F_SmartFill rebuilds missing or damaged areas of a frame by looking at pixels around the area and intelligently growing inwards 9 F SmartPlate creates large clean plates from a sequence of frames 10 F_SmartZoom high quality scaling of images using tem poral information Improvements 1 F_DeGrain Tune Huge parameter added 2 F_DeGrain and F_ReGrain mattes added to allow for se lective degraining regraining 3 F_Kronos calculator function added to help set animation curves 4 F_WireRemoval the ability to import tracking data from Discreet s tracker has been added Bug Fix
173. o shape where the shape rotation was also keyframed the selection of the control vertices would fail near the first keyframe 3 Kronos adding motion blur without retiming the clip would add blur for the next frame rather than current frame This has been fixed in this release version The Foundry Furnace 240 APPENDIX A Furnace 1 0b4 Furnace 1 0b3 Known Bugs amp Workarounds There are no known bugs This is the fourth beta release of Furnace on Discreet Release Date 01 September 2003 Requirements Furnace is compiled MIPS4 and requires Irix 6 2 or later on R8000 R10000 or R5000 microprocessors fire 5 3 smoke 5 3 and inferno 5 3 flame 8 3 and flint 8 3 are supported fffis 7 5 versions and later are likely to work New Features There are no new features Improvements There are no improvements to existing features Bug Fixes 1 Steadiness Align did not cache their data correctly in the animation curves This has been fixed 2 Kronos multiple motion blur samples caused the output to be offset to the left This has been fixed Known Bugs amp Workarounds 1 Roto ought to be able to render a roto shape as a matte This is the third beta release of Furnace on Discreet Release Date 28 August 2003 Requirements Furnace is compiled MIPS4 and requires Irix 6 2 or later on R8000 R10000 or R5000 microprocessors fire 5 3 smoke 5 3 and inferno 5 3 flame 8 3 and flint 8 3 are s
174. o zero we will only look for motion in the blue channel Red Weight sets the contribution the red channel will make in the calculation of the motion vectors Green Weight sets the contribution the green channel will make in the calculation of the motion vectors Blue Weight sets the contribution the blue channel will make in the calculation of the motion vectors Roto Matte See Roto Matte Tool on page 25 Crops See Crops on on page 33 Furnace The Foundry Examples 151 Examples Carnaby Street The images for the following example can be downloaded from our web site In this example we will repair frame 4 of a 10 frame sequence which has some damage in the blue channel as shown in Figure 22 4 Figure 22 4 Damaged frame Figure 22 5 Repaired frame Download File motionrepaircarnaby tar gz Step by Step 1 Import the 10 frame clip carnaby tif 2 Look at frame 4 and see the damage 3 Load F_MotionRepair and select the carnaby clip for both inputs 4 Switch Auto Key on 5 Goto frame 4 which is a bad frame and set Valid Frame to O Ignore the warning message 6 Goto frame 3 which is a good frame and set Valid Frame to 1 7 Goto frame 5 which is a good frame and set Valid Frame to 1 8 Render the clip Rather than replacing the whole of frame 4 with the output of F_MotionRepair it s worth creating a matte of the damaged region and pasting only this region over the original
175. od faith will violate any such laws or regulations This Agreement is the exclusive agreement between the par ties concerning the subject matter hereof and supersedes any and all prior oral or written agreements negotiations or other dealings between the parties concerning such subject This Agreement may be modified only by a written instrument signed by both parties If any action is brought by either party to this Agreement against the other party regarding the subject mat ter hereof the prevailing party shall be entitled to recover in Furnace The Foundry End User License Agreement 251 addition to any other relief granted reasonable attorneys fees and expenses of litigation Should any term of this Agreement be declared void or unenforceable by any court of competent jurisdiction such declaration shall have no effect on the re maining terms of this Agreement The failure of either party to enforce any rights granted hereunder or to take action against the other party in the event of any breach hereunder shall not be deemed a waiver by that party as to subsequent enforce ment of rights or subsequent actions in the event of future breaches This Agreement shall be governed by and construed in accordance with English Law Copyright c 2008 The Foundry Visionmongers Ltd All Rights Reserved Do not duplicate The Foundry Furnace 252 APPENDIX C Appendix C Kronos Algorithm Introduction Ter
176. of an object all taken from slightly different positions each one will contain different sub pixel information about the object Using the Foundry s ad vanced motion estimation technology it is possible to align this subpixel information from a number of images in order to make a higher resolution output This differs from a sinc interpolation filter or sharpening filter as the output will con tain information from all the input frames not just one as in standard filtering operations In Figure 31 2 on the next page the image is split vertically down through the clock face On the left side F_SmartZoom has been used to enlarge the original image On the right hand side a bilinear filter has been used to do the same Note that F_SmartZoom produces a much sharper result Furnace The Foundry Quick Start 201 Quick Start Inputs Parameters Zoom Figure 31 2 F_SmartZoom compared to Bilinear zoom Connect the input clip to FSmartZoom Select how big the output plate should be using the resize factor Make sure you are at the first frame in the sequence and then step through from frame to frame The output of the plug in should get progressively more detailed If there is significant scale changes in the sequence turn on scale Similarly if there are significant perspective changes turn on perspective If the picture still looks soft try switch ing filter from gaussian to sinc If the image looks harsh try incre
177. of sampleRegion Sample Bottom bottom position of sampleRegion Use Region whether to use the DeBlur Region or process the entire frame In this example we will deblur a motion blurred image of the department store Liberty of London This image is a difficult one due to the black and white woodwork of the Tudor exterior these stripes tend to produce ringing in the output The input is shown in Figure 10 5 Step by Step 1 Import the image and apply DeBlur If our motion blur was non horizontal we d have to change the angle parameter to the correct angle to set the direction or swtich on the automatic calculation Move the sample region up so that it s positioned over the stripes and in Figure 10 3 The result isn t that great because the Blur Size is wrong The input image has a blur size of roughly 5 pixels so increase the Blur Size to 5 The result in the sampleRegion should look like Figure 10 4 To increase the amount of blur removed increase Itera tions to 60 There is still a small amount of noise in the result Try setting Regularisation to 250 to decrease this which should also help the small amount of ringing that has occurred Finally increase the DeBlur Region to be the same size as the input image You should get a before and after like those in Figures 10 5 and 10 6 The Foundry Furnace 80 DEBLUR Figure 10 3 Input Figure 10 4 Output Figure 10 5 Blu
178. on This has been fixed 4 Steadiness now stores the analysis results so that cam era jitter can be reapplied Known Bugs amp Workarounds 1 Roto ought to be able to render a roto shape as a matte Furnace 1 0b2 This is the second beta release of Furnace on Discreet The Foundry Furnace 242 APPENDIX A Release Date 7 August 2003 Requirements Furnace is compiled MIPS4 and requires Irix 6 2 or later on R8000 R10000 or R5000 microprocessors fire 5 3 smoke 5 3 and inferno 5 3 flame 8 3 and flint 8 3 are supported fffis 7 5 versions and later are likely to work New Features Not applicable Improvements There are no improvements to existing features Bug Fixes 1 Align match movement failed due to a fault in the analyze parameter This has been fixed 2 BlockTexture it was not possible to grab the sample tex ture box widget when the ost controls were displayed This has been fixed 3 BlockTexture the crops page was labelled incorrectly This has been fixed 4 DeFlicker the display of the motion mask has been im proved 5 Example Images these are now installed to the same di rectory for easier loading 6 Example Images all the texture images shipped in JPEG format have been converted to TIFF so that they appear in the file browser alongside the other pictures 7 Kronos debug output to the terminal has been removed 8 Clip Labels an initialisation bug caused the case of the
179. on tools are global that is they try to reduce the same amount of flicker from the whole of the image If only parts of an image are flickering this technique will fail as it will reduce the flicker from one part but introduce it in another The difficulty in automatically correcting for spatial variable flicker is differentiating between flicker and motion It is worth repeating that this spark will reduce flicker in most cases but it is unlikely to remove all traces of flicker In this spark we divide the image up into blocks and adjust the contrast and brightness in these regions to correct complex localised flicker We also analyse motion vectors between the Current and reference frames and only use a global luminance change for blocks that have significant motion In addition the spark will allow you to analyse the flicker from one sequence and apply the same flicker to another This can be particularly useful for example when trying to match the flicker on a CG element that is being composited in to a flickering sequence The only decision that s worth making at the start is whether to deflicker relative to the previous frame of the sequence or to a specified frame To decide this you ll need to look carefully at the flickering clip If the flicker is in a part of the image that is not moving much then choose Specified as the Reference method For example you may have a locked off shot with action in the foreground but the flicker
180. ong as the motion matte there is also black A red area will have unreliable data in the red channel but the green and blue channels will be locally deflicker subject to the motion matte See Figure 11 4 e Result renders the deflickered image Action sets whether to deflicker the Source input or copy the flicker from the Source to Copy inputs e Copy Flicker analyses flicker from the first Source input and applies it to the second Copy input This works best if the source and copy clips have a similar luminance e Deflicker analyses and deflickers the first Source input Block Size sets the size of the blocks that are analysed for flicker Smaller blocks will allow more complex flicker to be modelled but will produce less accurate and robust results and will take longer to render Variance Thresh sets the threshold value for plain areas above which blocks are discarded due to the lack of reliable flicker data If your results are poor it s worth decreasing this value Motion Thresh sets the threshold value above which lo calised deflicker is abandoned because of motion in the frame If your results are poor and you can see that there is little motion in the clip you should increase this value Setting the Motion Thresh to O will turn off localised deflicker for all mov ing objects and apply global luminance changes to reduce the flicker Smoothness sets the number of times the flicker parameters are smoothed b
181. orally degraining Show Motion Map displays the regions of image that are thought to be moving white and so will have only spatial filtering applied White areas are considered to be moving and black areas static Show Grain switch this on to display the grain that is being subtracted from the image Exaggerate Grain scales the grain before it is displayed by Show Grain This is just to make any artifacts more visible These are the coordinates of the analysis box These should not be edited Use the Sample Grain button and drag a rect angle over the image See Roto Matte Tool on page 25 To speed up the fine tuning of the image draw a small roto on the image Only pixels in the roto will be degrained The rachael cin image for the following example can be down loaded from our web site Download File grain tar gz Step by Step 1 Import rachael cin Make sure you load the picture ci neon format centered and cropped particularly if you are using a video sized framestore Do not resize the image as this will destroy the grain Do not look at a proxy of the image 2 Apply F_DeGrain to this image Furnace The Foundry Examples 97 3 Move the rectangle over the image picking an area free of clutter as shown in Figure 12 2 Figure 12 4 Bad Sample Figure 12 5 Good Sample 4 You should practise looking at the grain and varying the Tune parameter to increase or decrease the grain re moved No
182. original unrepaired frame and the final repair e Repair output will show the final repair Rig Region defines whether the area to be repaired comes from the external matte input or a builtin roto shape e Roto use a builtin roto shape to specify the area that should be repaired with pixels from other frames in the sequence e Mask use the second input as a matte to specify the area that should be repaired with pixels from other frames in the sequence White pixels are replaced Direction sets whether to search forwards backwards or in both directions to find missing data The number of frames searched is defined by the parameter Look Ahead Frames e Neither does not search other frames in the sequence If you re setting up roto keyframes you can speed up processing by using this value e Backward searches frames before the current frame e Forward searches frames after the current frame e Both searches before and after the current frame Fail Marker Alpha the unrepaired region is marked in red blended back with the original image using this transparency value See Figure 27 3 Step Size not all pixels around the rig are matched in neigh bouring frames to find the corresponding motion The default value of 10 means that only 1 10th of the pixels are actu ally used Lowering this value may increase rendering time but might result in closer object alignment in the repair area A hard edged difference key is automa
183. oto Control Points Control points are drawn as small circles around the roto shape or squares if the Bezier toggle is not turned on If a control point is currently selected it will be drawn with a red centre To move a control point simply click and drag it To select multiple control points drag a selection box over the points you want To move multiple control points simply click on any one of the selected points and move it To deselect control points click on the screen away any se lected points To delete control points click on one of the selected points and drop it in the rubbish bin at the bottom left of the screen The bin will only appear when the control point gets close The cursor turns into a red shape and the bin s lid will raise when you have reached the bin To add a new control point move your cursor over the edge of the curve and it will turn into a green shape and a ghostly green key appear Now simply click on the outline of the curve and a new point will be created with automatic tangents Tangents If your roto is a Bezier shape then it will have a pair of tangents displayed at each control point These control how smooth the curve is between control points To move a tangent simply click and drag on it You can only modify one tangent at a time There are three types of tangents 1 Split Tangents drawn with solid lines and triangular ends paired tangents are independent so t
184. ou can select Show Test Plate This generates a sheet of grain with the same luminance level as the mean of the sample region The sample region with the original grain is also displayed If you turn off the onscreen controls it should be impossible to differentiate between the two regions Figure 26 7 shows a good selection area giving a good test plate of grain in Figure 26 8 Figure 26 9 shows a poor selection area since it contains Figure 26 7 Good selection Figure 26 8 producing a area good test plate of grain free of artifacts image detail Figure 26 10 shows the resulting test plate which clearly highlights the problem Figure 26 9 Bad selection Figure 26 10 giving a poor area result Grain manipulation at proxy resolution should be avoided as the results are unreliable The grain selection area may be too small at proxy resolution to give a good result and making this area larger may drag in unwanted detail from the image If you try to use F_ReGrain at proxy resolution we simply pass the image through untouched and issue the following warning SPARK F_ReGrain selection box too small at proxy resolution The Foundry Furnace 170 REGRAIN We decided that this was preferable behaviour to doing poor grain replication at proxy resolution There is a minimum size for the selection box which is about 37x37 at full resolution The onscreen tool will not allow the box to dip below the minimum size b
185. ou can composite back onto the Reference footage to help do some of the background fills Furnace The Foundry Examples 75 21 22 Switch off Composite Ref and render the final sequence As with the F_Align example you can use an animating soft wipe Tinder s T Wipe spark works well to quickly composite the two clips together Figure 9 3 Final pan with twins The Foundry Furnace 76 DEBLUR DeBlur Introduction Quick Start This chapter looks at automatically removing motion blur or out of focus blur from an image using the Foundry s F_DeBlur plug in For hints tips tricks and feedback please visit http support thefoundry co uk Most blur removal algorithms simply apply a sharpen filter to the image trying to boost image edges and give the impression of removing blur The Foundry s F_DeBlur plug in attempts a full solution of the deconvolution problem by taking the filter that originally caused the blur and applying the inverse filter to the image This has the effect of taking each pixel in the image that has been spread across a number of its neighbours and recombining it back to its original form The F_DeBlur algorithm is designed to remove global motion blur or out of focus blur When deblurring a foreground object over an unblurred background the algorithm should succeed on most of the foreground However it s likely that it will also introduce artifacts to the background
186. own in Figure 35 1 1 5 Onframe 1 check that the repair looks good The sparks s default simple reconstruction works quite well in this example 6 Now switch on rolling repair and render the sequence 7 It s worth rendering the same sequence out with rolling repair switched off so you can compare the difference 8 If you want to remove the whole wire and I m sure you do then you can translate the ends of the wire in the an imation sheet so that the wire goes off screen as shown in Figure35 12 The Foundry Furnace 228 WIREREMOVAL Figure 35 11 Import the track data Figure 35 12 Use the animation sheet to extend the wire ends Furnace The Foundry 229 Appendix A Release Notes Furnace 3 1v1 This section describes the requirements new features im provements fixed bugs and known bugs amp workarounds for each release of Furnace This is a maintenance release of Furnace on Autodesk IFFFS products Release Date 2nd December 2008 Requirements Flame Flint Fire Inferno or Smoke Flame 8 5 on Irix32 Flame 9 5 on Irix64 Flint 9 0 9 5 2007 2008 2009 on Linux32 Flame 9 5 2007 2008 2009 on Linux64 and Burn 2 0 2007 have been tested Foundry FLEXIm Tools FFT 5 0v1 or later for floating license support New Features There are no new features Improvements 1 Licensing has been removed from the Burn version of the software The Burn version of the software is now prov
187. p interactivity The Foundry Furnace 94 DEGRAIN Spatial Tuning Temporal Tuning If either not enough grain has been removed or the picture has been soften by removing too much grain it will be necessary to fine tune the parameters Increasing Tune will remove more grain reducing it will remove less This is a fairly crude way of setting the parameters Below this are more advanced controls The easiest way to find the optimal setting for F_DeGrain is to look at what is removed from the image Do this by switching on Show Grain This will display the grain that is being subtracted from the image and scaled by Exaggerate Grain to make it more obvious Only grain should be visible in this image If you can see a lot of picture detail it means the degrainer is working too hard and removing too much image which will lead to a soft result The degrainer works by decomposing the image into 4 levels To set the first level select Detail Huge and adjust Tune Huge until the image is only just visible and then repeat for large medium and small Often the blue channel will contain more grain than the red and green This can be checked by viewing the individual colour channels If this is the case increase Tune Blue until enough grain is being removed When you are happy with the settings make sure Tune is set to all and switch off Show Grain to see the degrained image To fine tune the temporal filter in F DeGrain it is necessary to
188. pair This can be set to the second input or a rotomatte The following four parameters apply only to the rematch method Weight Thresh sets the threshold value for plain areas above which blocks are discarded due to the lack of reliable data If your results are poor it s worth decreasing this value Motion Threshold sets the threshold value above which lo calised damage is abandoned because of motion in the frame If your results are poor and you can see that there is little mo tion in the sequence you should increase this value Setting the Motion Threshold to 1 will turn off localized damage repair for all moving objects and apply a global algorithm to reduce the damage Block Size sets the size of the blocks that are analysed Smaller blocks will allow more complex damage to be modeled but will produce less accurate and robust results and will take longer to render See Roto Matte Tool on page 25 See Crops on on page 33 The Foundry Furnace 56 COLOURALIGN ColourAlign Introduction Quick Start This chapter looks at colour channel registration using Fur nace s plug in F_ColourAlign For hints tips tricks and feed back please visit http support thefoundry co uk Occasionally due to damage to the film or errors in the scanning process the red green and blue channels can become mis aligned F_ColourAlign will automatically repair this damage by aligning the channels with a reference c
189. pe to cover the bike as it moves off screen Move to frame 10 and move the roto using the red crosshairs Move to frame 20 and repeat You may need to scale the shape as the bike moves into the distance View the result F4 and switch on Show Roto Matte to render the matte Process and Exit We now need to paint through from the aligned sequence over the orig inal bike clip To do this we can use Flame s builtin compositing tools Select Effects gt Compositor and select F_Align then the bike then the roto matte This composites the clean area over the bike using the matte Figure 4 5 Before Figure 4 6 After Furnace The Foundry Examples 43 MatchMoving Note 15 Process 16 That s it This example could also be solved using F_RigRemoval on page 173 In this example we re going to use F Align to stick a new poster Figure 4 7 on the side of a moving bus Figure 4 8 Figure 4 7 Poster Figure 4 8 Bus Download File alignbus tar gz Step by Step 1 2 Import bus tif busMatte tif and busLogo tif Load F_Align into a Sparks button and click on the busL ogo then the bus then the bus again for the three inputs Reset the spark Switch the Match popup to Ref To Ref to show we are only interested in motion on the Reference clip the bus Set Static Frame to 25 This frame corresponds to the position of the poster In other words if you composite the static poster image o
190. plex motion detector is required to flag these regions and allow a modified dirt detection scheme to be used The complex motion detector works by dividing the image into blocks and looking at the consistency of the estimated motion for each block across five frames Once each individual block has been assigned complex motion or not a smoothing algorithm is applied to the block to generate the complex motion matte for the image These parameters have no effect unless aggressionLevel is set to custom Motion Threshold this threshold is the level below which we declare a block of image to be undergoing complex motion A lower threshold will increase the amount of image flagged as complex motion Motion Smoothing this is the amount of smoothing applied to the blocks of image that have been detected as moving with complex motion More smoothing will increase the amount of image flagged as complex motion See Crops on on page 33 The images for the following example can be downloaded from our web site This clip of a roller blader suffers from a lot of dust Download File dirtremovalrollerblades tar gz Step by Step 1 Import the roller blade clip Play it and look at the dirt 2 Load F DirtRemoval into a sparks button and select the roller blade clip again 3 Set the Plate Size to PAL NTSC 4 View the dirt using Output Show Repaired Dirt 5 Set Output to Repair and render Furnace The Foundry Examples 113
191. pplied by the plug in Remember the algorithm is inventing pixels that do not exist anywhere else in the image so don t expect miracles if there are no similar structures or objects it won t be possible to reinvent them But this tool is fast and worth trying before other techniques are used In Figure 29 3 we have a single frame from a timelapse se quence of London s Trafalgar Square We have used F_SmartFill to remove two lampposts The results are not perfect and need a small amount of touchup paint work but it does speedup the process of creating the clean plate You can have a go of this example if you wish The algorithm is only designed for repairing still images making it ideal for the generation of clean plates Furnace The Foundry Quick Start 185 Quick Start Inputs Figure 29 3 Before Figure 29 4 After Generate a matte of the missing or damaged region Figure 29 6 Add this to the alpha channel of the source frame and connect to the F_SmartFill plug in The region specified by the matte should be filled in using nearby textures and structures Figure 29 5 Original Figure 29 6 Matte If suitable textures are a long way from the missing region in the source image try increasing X Search Range and Y Search Range If the texture has large repetitive structure increase Block Size If there are obvious structural elements in the missing re gion consider painting a guess image This is just
192. put and output As a aworkaround apply with method set to frame and keyframe 1 on the first frame and the final frame on the final frame 2 F_WireRemoval BUG ID 451 shearing on the repair is visible on shallow wires that go off screen bottom or left but only if the sinc filtering is switched on This is a maintenance release of Furnace on Discreet Release Date 20 January 2008 Furnace The Foundry Release Notes 231 Furnace 3 0v4 Requirements Flame Flint Fire Inferno or Smoke Flame 8 5 on Irix32 Flame 9 5 on Irix64 Flint 9 0 9 5 2007 on Linux32 Flame 9 5 2007 on Linux64 and Burn 2 0 2007 have been tested Foundry FLEXIm Tools FFT 4 0v8 or later for floating license support New Features There are no new features Improvements There are no improvements to existing features Fixed Bug 1 BUG ID 2251 more stability problems fixed for Irix and Linux Known Bugs amp Workarounds 1 F_Kronos BUG ID 609 when applied with timing method set to speed and speed set to 100 results in an offset of 1 frame between input and output As a aworkaround apply with method set to frame and keyframe 1 on the first frame and the final frame on the final frame 2 F_WireRemoval BUG ID 451 shearing on the repair is visible on shallow wires that go off screen bottom or left but only if the sinc filtering is switched on This is a maintenance release of Furnace on Discreet Release Date 2
193. r and adjust your timing curve from there Furnace The Foundry Examples 131 6 When you re happy set the mode to motion With the Vector Detail set to 20 you will see part of the road under the taxi being dragged by the taxi To improve this increase this value to 100 Taxi Motion Blur Let s use the same taxi and add motion blur without retiming the clip Figure 17 12 Slow in slow Figure 17 13 Fast in slow out out 1 Import taxi tif 2 Load the F_Kronos spark Click on the spark button then the taxi on the reels for all three inputs 3 Press Reset All and set the Speed to 100 so we don t change the length of the clip 4 Set Shutter Time to 100 and Shutter Samples to 10 and process 5 That s it Kronos Algorithm For more information see Appendix C on page 252 The Foundry Furnace 132 MATCHGRADE MatchGrade Introduction Quick Start This chapter looks at automatic colour matching using Fur nace s plug in F_MatchGrade For hints tips tricks and feed back please visit http support thefoundry co uk It is often necessary to match the colours of one clip with those of another When filming outside at different times of the day you will inevitably get colour and luminance differences that will have to be corrected if the sequences are to be composited or edited together You can of course use colour correction tools and trial and error to try and match the clip
194. re or Documentation con templated herein exceed the License Fee paid to The Foundry or its authorized reseller for use of the Software Further more IN NO EVENT SHALL THE RELEASED PARTIES BE LIABLE TO LICENSEE UNDER ANY THEORY FOR ANY INDIRECT SPE CIAL INCIDENTAL PUNITIVE EXEMPLARY OR CONSEQUEN TIAL DAMAGES INCLUDING DAMAGES FOR LOSS OF BUSINESS OR LOSS OF PROFITS OR THE COST OF PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES REGARDLESS OF WHETHER THE RELEASED PARTIES KNOW OR HAVE REASON TO KNOW OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES AND REGARDLESS OF WHETHER ANY REMEDY SET FORTH HEREIN FAILS OF ITS ES SENTIAL PURPOSE No action arising out of or related to this Agreement regardless of form may be brought by Licensee more than one 1 year after Licensee s initial receipt of the Software provided however to the extent such one 1 year limit may not be valid under applicable law then such period shall limited to the shortest period allowed by law This Agreement is effective upon Licensee s acceptance of the terms hereof by clicking on the Accept button and Licensee s payment of the License Fee and the Agreement will remain in effect until termination If Licensee breaches this Agreement The Foundry may terminate the License granted hereunder by notice to Licensee In the event the License is terminated Licensee will either return to The Foundry all copies of the Software and Documentation in Licensee s possession or if The
195. rocess to try to refine the edges of regions Unfortunately this may introduce artifacts in textured but spatially flat areas Auto Normalise sets whether to normalize the depth to the range of the output image Clip Low if Auto Normalize is off use this to normalise the output so it is viewable This is the depth that will be normal ized to zero black in the image Clip High if Auto Normalize is off use this to normalise the output so it is viewable This is the depth that will be normalized to maximum white in the image See Roto Matte Tool on page 25 In this example we will infer the relative depth of objects in a clip of Leicester Square in London shown in Figure 14 4 Furnace The Foundry Examples 105 Step by Step 1 Apply F_Depth to the LeicesterSquare sequence and go to frame 5 The output will look like Figure 14 3 Figure 14 3 Initial output 2 Whilst the result in Figure 14 3 is reasonable we can make it better We can refine the edges and also in crease contrast between foreground and background by positioning our background region selection more pre cisely It s probably best to switch update to manual while you do this position the box so that it s in the centre but at the top of the input as shown in Figure 14 4 Figure 14 4 Background Selection 3 Onupdating you should get a result like the one in Figure 14 5 The Foundry Furnace 106 DEPTH Fi
196. rred image Furnace The Foundry Examples 81 Figure 10 6 DeBlurred image Fruit In this example we will deblur the fruit sequence automatically inferring the blur direction Step by Step 1 Apply a F_DeBlur to the input and switch on the cal culation of the direction of motion blur using Calculate Angle It s probably worth positioning the DeBlur Region over a part of the image with some detail for example the lettering in the blue label on the wine bottom in the bottom right of the frame as shown in 10 7 2 Set the Blur Size to 7 The image has begun to sharpen as shown in Figure 10 8 Figure 10 7 Input Figure 10 8 Output The Foundry Furnace 82 DEBLUR 3 Increase Iterations to 80 to get it even sharper 4 This has introduced quite a lot of noise into the image so increase Regularisation to 500 giving a result as in Figure 10 10 Figure 10 9 Input Furnace The Foundry Examples 83 Figure 10 10 Final Output The Foundry Furnace 84 DEFLICKER DeFlicker Introduction Quick Start When working in film you sometimes have to deal with shots that have a luminance flicker F_DeFlicker provides a solution for removing spatially variable flicker from such sequences For hints tips tricks and feedback please visit http support thefoundry co uk F_DeFlicker is designed to reduce spatially variable flicker from a sequence Most current flicker reducti
197. s tif 2 Play the clip Note that the wires have already been sta bilized using F_Steadiness and will not therefore need to be tracked in this example 3 Load F_WireRemoval and select the clouds from the reel Make sure you re working at full resolution 4 Position the onscreen icons at either end of the wire View the Source F1 while you re doing this as it makes lining up the wire easier The wire is also slightly curved so you ll have to position the middle cross hairs too 5 View Result F4 to see the repair Set the method to gradient and increase the width to 8 then process 6 Toremove the other wires you will need to apply F WireRemoval to the processed clip 7 Look at the part of the image where the wire crosses the root With the default values you ll see a bit of smudging Increase the Gradient Width factor to correct this This is a single frame of our office manager Sarah showing her face obscured by a thick wire Figure 35 7 it Figure 35 7 Original Figure 35 8 Inpainting This is a very tricky shot and Furnace does not give a perfect result and some painting will be required However it does get you most of the way there with little effort The recon struction method used here is inpainting which copies texture rather than interpolating under the grain You will need a high thickness value of say 35 As you can see in Figure 35 8 some painting will be required to disguise the join b
198. s But this tends to be time consuming and requires some considerable skill F MatchGrade does it all for you by automatically modifing the colour his togram of an image to match a reference image The plug in can also be used to add colour to black and white images Figure 18 1 Source image Figure 18 2 Reference image Figure 18 3 Output image Select one clip for the Source and another clip for the Copy From clip then select the Source clip again for the Copy To Furnace The Foundry Inputs 133 Inputs Parameters Examples Mike clip View the output which should now match the look of the reference Try increasing Iterations if the match isn t close enough The duplication of the source frame into the third input is to allow the use of a static transform if single images are connected to the second and third inputs This static transform will then be applied to every frame of a sequence connected to the first input F_MatchGrade has three inputs The colour histogram of the Copy From input is transferred to the image on the Copy To This enables connecting single image into the last two inputs to ensure the transformation is temporally uniform though generally F_MatchGrade is reasonably temporally consistent The parameters for this plug in are described below Iterations sets the number of refinement passes More it erations should produce a better match but will take longer In this example
199. s and blacks Download File colourmattebelle tar gz The Foundry Furnace 66 COLOURMATTE Figure 8 9 Default matte Furnace The Foundry 67 Correlate Introduction Quick Start F Correlate contains some of the functionality of the Align plug in but has some additional features to target it specif ically at the problem of spatially and temporally aligning two separate passes of the same scene F_Correlate also allows you to match the grade of the two clips Figure 9 1 F_Correlate used to match move two clips into one You ll need two clips each a separate pass over the same scene The first clip will be the one you re going to reposition in time and space The second clip will be the reference clip which is to be unaltered The third clip is a mask clip used if there is foreground motion in the first source clip which is confusing the analysis Initially just pick an arbitrary clip if needs be we can exit and generate the correct matte Inside the plug in make sure the length of the timeline is set correctly by modifying the clip length at the right end of the standard timeline Typically this should be set to the length of the reference clip the second input Then you need to tell the plug in the length of the source clip the first input by setting the Source Length parameter correctly Having done this click on the Set Default Timing button This sets up a default timing curve in
200. s are provided to alter the size of the sample box You will find it easier to switch your view to Source as you re doing this rather than looking at the Result Furnace The Foundry Inputs 215 Figure 34 6 400x400 pixel Figure 34 7 720x576 texture padded texture Colour Correction If there is an obvious colour gradient across the tile switch on Remove Gradient The effect of this is shown in Figure 34 8 Adjusting Remove Amount controls the amount of gradient reduction Too high a value will cause the image to loose quality and a setting of zero will give no gradient removal Figure 34 8 The wooden plank has been tiled vertically and repeated horizontally The right hand image shows the effect of switching on Remove Gradient Inputs F Tile has one source input that is the texture that will be sampled and tiled Parameters The parameters for this spark are described below The Foundry Furnace 216 TILE Tile Examples Overlap controls how much the tiles overlap A large overlap is more likely to give a better join Blend Size controls how much overlapping edges are mixed together This can be useful to disguise joins on some types of image Large values should be avoided as this will result in an obvious soft edge between tiles Remove Gradient switch this on to remove colour gradients in the image which makes the tiling more obvious Remove Amount controls the amount of gradient r
201. s retimer and is designed to slow down or speed up footage It works by calculating the motion in the sequence in order to generate motion vectors These motion vectors describe how each pixel moves from frame to frame With accurate motion vectors it is possible to generate an output image at any point in time throughout the sequence by interpolating along the direction of the motion Figure 17 1 Simple mix of Figure 17 2 Kronos vector two frames to achieve an in interpolation of the same between frame two frames Kronos contains a number of controls to allow you to trade off render time verses accuracy of vectors F_Kronos takes three inputs The first Motion is the clip that is analysed for motion The second Warp is the clip that will be retimed using the motion vectors from the first input Often these inputs will be the same The third clip is an optional mask which can be used to assist with separating differing motions in the Motion clip Load F_ Kronos and select the same clip three times Now simply process the result This will render the clip at half speed You should increase the Total Frames field in the Timeline to process the correct number of frames for a half speed retime For a 50 frame input clip at half speed you need to change the Total Frames from 50 to 98 this takes some careful thinking if you imagine we going to generate one new artificial frame between each original frame then we only have 49 gaps to
202. s shall be at least as great as the measures Licensee uses to keep Licensee s own confidential information secure but in any case using no less than a reasonable degree of care to hold the Software Doc umentation and any other Confidential Information in strict confidence and safe custody The Foundry may request in which case Licensee agrees to comply with certain reasonable security measures as part of the use of the Software and Doc umentation Licensee acknowledges that monetary damages may not be a sufficient remedy for unauthorized disclosure of Confidential Information and that The Foundry shall be en titled without waiving any other rights or remedies to such injunctive or equitable relief as may be deemed proper by a court of competent jurisdiction Licensee shall advise The Foundry on demand of all locations where the Software or Documentation is used or stored Li censee shall permit The Foundry or its authorized agents to inspect all such locations during normal business hours and on reasonable advance notice Licensee agrees not to solicit for employment or retention and not to employ or retain any of The Foundry s current or future employees who were or are involved in the development and or creation of the Software The Foundry Furnace 250 APPENDIX B SECTION 15 U S GOVERNMENT LICENSE RIGHTS SECTION 16 SURVIVAL SECTION 17 IMPORT EXPORT CONTROLS SECTION 18 MISCELLANEOUS The So
203. s with the roto Roto Parameters The parameters for the roto group are described here and shown in Figure 3 11 Figure 3 11 Roto Parameters Mode this usually specifies whether the effect will use a roto shape external matte or something else In F_BlockTexture this parameter is called Fill because it is used to control where to fill the image with texture e Roto the spark uses the roto shape e Matte the spark uses the matte input e None the spark ignores any matte or roto shape Invert switch this on to invert the Roto or Matte Softness sets the amount of blurring applied to the Roto Matte Aspect controls the horizontal and vertical weighting of the blur 100 blurs only in X 100 blurs only in Y whilst 0 blurs equally in X and Y Edges this controls edge treatment of the matte Don t Process no edge treatment e Shrink Grow erodes or enlarges the Roto Matte by the Edge Push parameter Negative values shrink it positive values grow it The Foundry Furnace 32 COMMON CONTROLS Halo In Out extracts only the edges of the Roto Matte if Edge Push is negative only the inside edge is extracted if Edge Push is positive outside edges are extracted e Halo extracts the edges of the matte that is Edge Push pixels wide Edge Push how far to push the edges of the processed Roto Matte Exactly what is done with the edges is controlled by the Edges parameter Blur Inside
204. se Matte is switched on e Background the retimed background ignoring motion in the foreground Only available when Use Matte is switched on Mode sets the interpolation algorithm Using anything but Motion is fast to render and will allow you a quick preview of the speed of your retime e Motion vector interpolation is used to calculate the in between frame e Blend a mix between two frames is used for the inbe tween frame e Frame the nearest original frame is displayed Furnace The Foundry Examples 129 Crops Calculator Examples Taxi Retiming By default we analyse motion based on the luminance of the image Specifically this is a weighted average of the red green and blue channels However we can bias this using the red green and blue Weight parameters For example if we set the red and green weight parameters to zero we will only look for motion in the blue channel Red Weight sets the contribution the red channel will make in the calculation of the motion vectors Green Weight sets the contribution the green channel will make in the calculation of the motion vectors Blue Weight sets the contribution the blue channel will make in the calculation of the motion vectors See Crops on on page 33 This edit group will help you create animation curves Simply enter the original clip length Decide how many frames you want to end up with and put this into the Output Clip Length Then
205. sition in pixels of the scratch to be removed Scratch Width sets the width in pixels of the repair to be made Try to keep this value as small as possible Show the output can either be the repaired frame or a matte of the scratched region e Repair image with the scratch removed e Scratch Matte vertical line matte defining the scratch If you have successfully tracked the position of the scratch but failed to repair it this matte may be useful in fixing the scratch using more traditional compositing methods Points the number of undamaged pixels used to alter the statistics of the scratched pixels A value of 3 is similar to a simple interpolation across the damaged region values greater than 3 use increasingly more information from the nearby pixels to effect a more complex repair If the scratch is completely opaque against a detailed background then try a value close to 3 For more transparent scratches with slowing varying backgrounds increasing Points should produce better results Gradient Factor defines the maximum angle of interpola tion across the scratch By default this is set to 45 degrees Increasing gradientWidthFactor will allow features that cross the scratch more obliquely to be correctly repaired but can also lead to spurious matches See F WireRemoval page 35 for a more detailed explanation Median Width when reconstructing the scratched pixels rather than simply interpolating perpendicular to th
206. sparks button and select the leicester square clip on the reels as the source then a reel as the destination 3 Wait until the initial analysis of a segment of the clip around the current frame has been completed then play the clip The Foundry Furnace 212 STEADINESS 4 Switch off Analyse and experiment with different values for motion smoothing High values will remove more camera wobble 5 When you re happy process Furnace The Foundry 213 Tile Introduction Quick Start F_Tile is designed to intelligently repeat an image horizontally and vertically It does this by overlapping copies of itself and then trying to make the join between them as invisible as possible Obviously there are limitations but in many cases the resulting tile is extremely plausible Figure 34 1 Conventional Figure 34 2 Furnace tiling tiling with a vertical straight with a vertical jagged line be line join tween tiles The spark is written in such a way that it can take a small region of source image and repeat it both horizontally and vertically to generate a fullsized image It differs from Furnace s Texture sparks in that the new image has obvious repetition in it How ever it should be difficult to tell exactly how this repetition occurs Load F_Tile and select a source image that you want to tile and then a destination reel Press Reset All or set the display options to Full Image Widget then look at the So
207. sults as well as the parameters 8 F PixelTexture BUG ID 201 Using Smaller Segments could give non deterministic results This is now fixed 9 F_ColourMatte BUG ID 69 Use Known Background now functions correctly it was ignored in previous versions 10 All BUG ID 198 Setting Process to Preview will only pro cess on pushing the Preview button even if the current frame is changed Furnace The Foundry Release Notes 235 Furnace 2 0v2 Known Bugs and Workarounds 1 F Kronos BUG ID 609 when applied with timing method set to speed and speed set to 100 results in an offset on 1 frame between input and output As a workaround apply with method set to frame and keyframe frame 1 on the first frame and the final frame on the final frame 2 F WireRemoval BUG ID 451 shearing on the repair is visible on shallow wires that go offscreen bottom or left but only if sinc filtering is switched on 3 Some intermittent stability issues have been noted in Batch As a workaround use the plug ins in Desktop mode This is a maintenence release of Furnace on Discreet to fix a multithreading problem for Irix64 Release Date 23 November 2005 Requirements Flame Flint Fire Inferno or Smoke Flame 9 5 1 9 0 8 5 on Irix Flint 9 0 on Linux 32 and Burn 1 5 and 2 0 have been tested New Features There are no new features Improvements There are no improvements to existing features Bug Fixes 1
208. t to the top left of the frame as in Figure 13 1 4 Set Use Analysis to true You should get a better result as in Figure 13 4 on page 102 Figure 13 1 Original image Furnace The Foundry Examples 101 Figure 13 2 Zoomed original image Figure 13 3 Output image without analysis The Foundry Furnace 102 DENOISE Figure 13 4 Output image with analysis Furnace The Foundry 103 Depth Introduction Quick Start This chapter looks at calculating the depth channel Z channel from a clip using Furnace s plug in F Depth For hints tips tricks and feedback please visit http support thefoundry co uk Z depth compositing is usually associated with 3D computer generated images since accurate depth information can be automatically generated No such information is captured from live action footage However we have developed an algorithm that can extract a depth channel by looking at the parallax shifts in objects moving in a scene F_Depth uses The Foundry s advanced motion estimation tech nology to calculate the relative motion of objects in a sequence as this gives a reasonable approximation to depth However there are some restrictions We assume there is no local mo tion and the focal point of the camera moves in space i e the camera move is non nodal The depth is displayed as a grey scale image with white being closest to the camera and black furthest away Don t expe
209. t clips into the first and second inputs and set Action to Copy Flicker The flicker is copied from the first Source input to the second Clip input F_DeFlicker cannot be distributed across multiple machines on a network render farm See Network Rendering on page 19 F_DeFlicker has three inputs The first Source input is the flickering clip that will be deflickered if Action is set to De flicker The second Copy input has the flicker from the source input copied to this clip if Action is set to Copy Flicker The third GlobalMatte input can be used to mask off parts of the clip that are spoiling the global flicker calculations The parameters for this spark are described below Show sets what to display Furnace The Foundry Parameters 87 e Motion Matte renders a picture showing movement This can be useful when fine tuning the Motion Thresh White areas are considered to be moving and will only have global deflickering applied Black areas are considered static and may have localised deflickering applied See Figure 11 2 e Variance Matte renders a picture showing areas that are discarded due to lack of detail and hence reliable local deflicker parameters These areas are colour coded by red green and blue channel A white area will have unreliable data in all three channels A yellow area will have unreliable data in the red and green channel but the blue channel will undergo localised deflickering as l
210. t input black and white curved shape The fourth input is the bias matte and can influence the shape of the generated texture purple and green checker The parameters for this spark are described below Fill defines the area that should be filled with generated texture The Foundry Furnace 160 PIXELTEXTURE Figure 24 15 Shows the output of F PixelTexture using all four of the inputs shown in Figure 24 14 e Roto fills the rotoshape e Matte fills the matte third input e Screen fills the whole screen with texture and ignores any rotoshape or matte Sample Left sets the left position of the rectangular region used to sample the texture Sample Right sets the right position of the rectangular re gion used to sample the texture Sample Top sets the top position of the rectangular region used to sample the texture Sample Bottom sets the bottom position of the rectangular region used to sample the texture Remove Gradient if the source region contains a colour gra dient across it the resultant texture will contain this gradient broken up Remove Gradient attempts to remove the gradient on the source material before generating the texture Remove Amount sets the amount of gradient that is re moved by Remove Gradient Luminance Match switch this on to match the luminance of the new texture with the luminance of the source region in order to help hide the join Luminance Blur con
211. t that may be good enough It s certainly worth trying first before using other techniques Figure 29 13 Before Figure 29 14 After Download File smartfilltrafalgar tar gz Step by Step 1 Import the image of Trafalgar Square 2 Load F_SmartFill and click on Trafalgar Square as all three inputs 3 Draw round one of the lampposts 4 That s it Here s another example Again the results are far from perfect but may be good enough in some circumstances lt also takes seconds to generate so it s often worth a try before trying other compositing techniques Download File alignbelleleft tar gz Furnace The Foundry Examples 189 Figure 29 15 Before Figure 29 16 After Step by Step 1 Import BelleLeft 000 1 tif Load F_SmartFill and click on the image as all three inputs Draw round the model as shown above Increase the X Search Range UN Bb Ww N That s it The Foundry Furnace 190 SMARTPLATE SmartPlate Introduction This chapter looks at stitching images together into one large image using Furnace s plug in F SmartPlate For hints tips tricks and feedback please visit http support thefoundry co uk F_SmartPlate takes an image sequence and stitches the frames together to generate a single large image It uses the Foundry s advanced motion estimation technology to calculate the best way to align one frame with another using all the image in formation not
212. t the noise is white Analysis Frame the frame at which the analysis is performed When you move the analysis position X Centre and Y Centre this will update to the current frame X Centre the x position of the centre of the selection box Y Centre the y position of the centre of the selection box Tune Master this adjusts the overall amount of noise or grain that is removed Increase this value to remove more noise Tune Red reduces red noise individually Tune Green reduces green noise individually Tune Blue reduces blue noise individually Output sets whether the noise or the denoised image is used as output e Result the denoised output e Noise the noise that has been removed i e the original image minus the result Exaggerate Noise amplifies the noise when Output is set to Noise so that it can be viewed All the images for the following example can be downloaded from our web site The Foundry Furnace 100 DENOISE Mike This example we ll use F DeNoise to remove noise from a se quence Download File MikeWire tgz Step by Step 1 Import MikeWire tif as the input Go to frame 9 This is just a good example Any frame will do This frame is shown in Figure 13 1 2 Select PAL NTSC for Plate Size You should get a result in Figure 13 3 on the next page 3 Whilst this is a reasonable result we can do better by using the analysis phase Move the analysis box widge
213. t time t 45 3 then we can say that 0 is frame 45 il is frame 46 and delta is 0 3 Delta only ranges from 0 0 to 1 0 Two sets of motion vectors are required to produce the new frame One set is derived by deciding for each pixel in i1 where its match is in i0 This set of offsets to get to iO from il is called the set of backward vectors Similarly the set of offsets describing how every pixel in i0 gets to a matching pixel in ilis called the set of forward vectors For simple motion in the body of an image sequence each set is pretty much the reflection of the other For more complicated overlapping motion and also towards the edges of the image where the background is moving the two sets can be quite different These are usually Furnace The Foundry Kronos Algorithm 253 Producing vectors areas where an object which is visible in 0 is not visible in i1 or viceversa Forward vectors and backward vectors are initially calculated separately Given a pair of images we produce a coarse heav ily pixelated set of vectors Using this crude estimation as an input and still using the same pair of images we refine this to produce a neater set of vectors one per pixel The input pair of images can obviously be reversed with the pair wired one way the nodes produce forward vectors and with the pair wired the other way the nodes produce backward vectors Given both sets of vectors we refine the vectors further so that
214. tching Perspective on corrects these errors as shown in Figure 27 11 HE Figure 27 10 Perspective off Figure 27 11 Perspective on Filtering sets the quality of filtering used to build the re paired frame e Normal this uses a bilinear interpolation This is quicker to render e Extreme this uses a sinc interpolation filter It s slower than the bilinear interpolation but produces sharper im ages and should be used in the final render Use Only Marked Frames as an alternative to Use Every Nth Frame you can mark frames from which repairs are to be fetched by switching this on and animating the Mark Frame control So in the case where motion is very slow at the be ginning of a sequence but the background we need becomes visible halfway through we may wish to unmark the first part of the sequence and mark the second half Mark Frame when Use Only Marked Frames is on you can animate this control on a perframe basis It has only two possible values O and 1 A frame marked O is not used for reconstruction data but will still be repaired A frame marked 1 will be used for reconstruction data The Foundry Furnace 178 RIGREMOVAL Key Show allows the output of different images e Test Composite shows a composite over a test colour using the original frame as the front clip and the differ ence key as the matte clip e Difference Key output will show a difference key be tween the
215. te how the fine hair detail is preserved Try sampling and comparing the grain from light and dark areas The Foundry Furnace 98 DENOISE DeNoise Introduction Quick Start This chapter looks at removing noise or grain from an image sequence using Furnace s plug in F DeNoise For hints tips tricks and feedback please visit http support thefoundry co uk F_DeNoise is designed to remove noise or grain from a clip Assuming there is no motion in a sequence the best way to reduce the noise is to take an average across a number of frames temporal averaging The noise which is different on each frame will be reduced and the picture which is the same will be reinforced Temporal averaging is far superior to aver aging pixels from within the same frame spatial averaging as it doesn t soften the image Unfortunately if there is motion in the sequence the averaged image will be blurred as the im age appears at different locations in each frame However by estimating the motion in the sequence using The Foundry s ad vanced motion estimation technology it is possible to compen sate for any motion and so average frames temporally without introducing any blurring artifacts As F_DeNoise is a fully motion compensated noise reducer it is very good at removing noise or grain from a sequence If you just have a single frame you should use the Furnace plug in F DeGrain This is a powerful wavelet based spatial noise red
216. the Reference clip alone The third input Reference Mask can be used to specify the region of the frame to be stabilised as an alternative to the onscreen rectangular box or roto shape The parameters for this spark are described below Analyse turns on and off analysis mode Analysis mode should normally be turned on the spark then does full motion analysis and stores the results It should subsequently be turned off if you want to reprocess the spark with the same setup but different input clips Frame selects the reference method used You are either trying to lock a clip down to one particular frame static or you are trying to line up each frame of one clip with each corresponding frame of the other clip relative e Relative select this to align a frame in the Source or Reference clip with a slipped frame from the Reference clip The Foundry Furnace 38 ALIGN e Static select this to align a frame in the Source or Reference clip with a single frame somewhere in the Ref erence clip Match selects the match method used Source to Ref when aligning frames align frames from the Source clip so that they match frames from the Ref erence clip e Ref to Ref when aligning frames align frames from the Reference clip with another frame from the same Reference clip Relative Static Frame when the reference method is set to Frame Static this control stores the frame number of the single static
217. the Source Frame control This is similar to the Source Frame curve in The Foundry Furnace 68 CORRELATE Inputs Parameters the Kronos retimer and can be viewed in the animation sheet to verify that it ramps up cleanly to make the first and the last frame of the source and reference coincide Set the Show popup on the right hand column of the first page of controls to Show Mix to see the blend between the retimed source and the reference By default the Analyse parameter is set to Temporal which means the plug in will search around whichever frame is given by the Source Frame parameter for the best match with no spatial compensation Where the two clips are far apart you can manually adjust the Source Frame control to improve the correlation When Analyse is set to None or Spatial you can hit the Find Temporal Match button to manually perform a search of the nearby frames to find a better match than the current one When the timing between the clips is looking good you can perform a spatial alignment by either using the Align Spatial button or setting Analyse to Spatial or Both This will now introduce a spatial offset to the source clip to improve the match to the reference Setting Analyse to Both means that both the spatial and temporal alignments are performed every time the spark processes which is why both the Align Spatial and Find Temporal Match buttons disappear Similarily if Analyse is set to None
218. the green channel will make in the calculation of the motion vectors Blue Weight sets the contribution the blue channel will make in the calculation of the motion vectors Furnace The Foundry 155 PixelTexture Introduction Furnace includes a number of texture generation plug ins These are used to generate resolution independent images that have the same look and feel as a small sample region F PixelTexture is one such plug in and should be used for replicating small scale textures for example tiny pebbles on a beach or a uniform fabric texture If the source image has larger scale detail with noticeable shapes requiring some form of continuity across regions that are stitched together F_BlockTexture should be used instead Figure 24 1 Small sample Figure 24 2 Large generated texture texture F PixelTexture works by copying pixels from a source region in the original image in such a way that similar but not nec essarily adjacent pixels are placed next to one another to try and generate more image with similar statistics to the source region It is also possible to supply a bias matte to this plug in that inclines the pixel choice towards a particular colour For ex ample if your source material contained pink flowers on a green background you could generate a bias matte with an arbitrary shaped pink region and arbitrary shaped green re gion The new texture would then be generated such that pink flowers te
219. they fit well together at the required output time delta This means that if ten inbetweens at ten different deltas are produced between 0 and i1 then the forward vectors and the backward vectors remain constant at this stage which then generates slightly modified vectors sets for each delta The pair of vector sets which uses this motion information and the original i0 and i1 are used to produce the final picture usually it does this by offsetting the pixels in i0 using the backward vectors scaled by 1 0delta and offsetting the pixels in il by using the forward vectors scaled by delta and blending the results using the value of delta as a mix value The Foundry Furnace Index Action 87 Add Roto Key 33 Align Spatial 69 Analyse 37 164 210 Analyse Bottom 57 Analyse Left 57 Analyse Response 172 Analyse Right 57 Analyse Top 57 Analysis 69 Analysis Frame 95 99 Aspect 31 179 Automatic Gain 222 Automatic Shutter Time 128 Auto Key Frame Roto 163 Auto Normalise 104 Avoid Fill Region 50 Background 104 Beta 78 Bezier Roto 32 Blend Amount 70 Blend Overlap 176 Blend Size 51 216 Block Size 50 55 87 127 150 153 186 Blue Noise 58 Blue Threshold 179 Blue Weight 129 150 154 Blur Direction 78 Blur Inside Haloes 32 Blur Size 78 Blur Type 78 Bottom 34 Build From One Image 127 149 153 Calculate Angle 78 Centre X Y 224 Change Thresh 111 Clear Motio
220. this popup defaults to showing the transformed Source For tuning however it can be used to show alternative combi nations of Source and Reference to better visualise how well the correlation fits e Normal show the transformed Source e Mix show a mix between the transformed Source and the Reference frame e Difference show the absolute value of the differ ence between the transformed Source and the Reference frame The Foundry Furnace 70 CORRELATE Blend Amount controls the amount of the mix when Show is set to Mix Source Frame this is the frame from the source clip which should be fetched to match the reference clip at the current frame Source Length this needs to be set to the length of the Source sequence as the plug in cannot work this out auto matically Note that the standard timeline needs to be set to the length of the Reference clip Search Range this is the distance along the timeline above and below the current value in Source Frame that will be searched when Find Temporal Match is pressed or an analysis is performed Set Default Timing if this timeline length is correctly set to the length of the Reference clip and the Source Length control is correctly set to the length of the Source clip pressing this button will put a simple curve into the Source Frame control which makes the beginnings and ends of the Source and Refer ence clips correlate Note that it also introduces a k
221. tically created during the rig removal process This key can be used to extract the foreground element that we been trying to remove The tools in this group are used to process that matte to improve it Furnace The Foundry Examples 179 Roto Mask Examples Red Threshold the red channel difference between the clean image and the original has to be above this threshold for a pixel to be in the key Green Threshold the green channel difference between the clean image and the original has to be above this threshold for a pixel to be in the key Blue Threshold the blue channel difference between the clean image and the original has to be above this threshold for a pixel to be in the key Invert switch this on to invert the treated key Grow enlarges or erodes the difference key negative values shrink the key Softness blurs the edge of the difference key De spot positive values remove isolated white pixels on the key Negative values remove isolated black pixels on the key Aspect the aspect ratio of the keying operations Show this parameter is a linked copy of the one on the Rig edit page Mode this controls what the Grow parameter does e Halo renders an outline from the difference key e Halo In Out renders a halo into or out of the key edge e Shrink Grow expands or erodes the key Shape each pixel in the key is grown or shrunk according to a particular shape e Square grows
222. ting Full Image from the Display tools then switch View to Result Press F4 The wire should be gone For thick wires you may need to increase the thickness param eter until the line edges disappear Select other reconstruct methods if simple isn t good enough Adjust Detail Length so as to leave grain undamaged more detail length without smudging image detail less detail length To remove a wire from a clip you ll need to animate the onscreen wire tool to match the position of the wire You can do this by setting keyframes by hand or by tracking the wire using the Discreet tracker and import the track data into F WireRemoval Discreet tracker Track two points along the wire near the ends of the wire Don t worry too much if the tracker jumps along the wire as long as it remains on the wire Export the Track X Y data not the Shift X Y data for both tracks In F WireRemoval import the track data into the start and end wire positions You may Furnace The Foundry Inputs 221 Inputs Parameters Wire need to extend the track position off screen This can be done in the animation curve editor by selecting the Start X Y curve and translating this off screen F_WireRemoval has one input the clip of the wire to be removed The parameters for this spark are described below Reconstruct sets the algorithm used to remove the wire from under the grain e Simple this method interpolates directly across the
223. to Speed and the Speed to 100 Then set Shutter Time to say 100 Increasing this value will give more blur Then increase Shutter Samples until you don t see multiple images say 10 This will add motion blur along the direction of motion without retiming See Taxi Motion Blur in the examples section F Kronos takes three inputs The first Motion is the clip that is analysed for motion The second Warp is the clip that will be retimed using the motion vectors from the first input Often these inputs will be the same The third clip is an optional mask which can be used to assist with separating differing motions without retiming The parameters for this spark are described below Timing use this parameter to describe how you wish to alter the timing of the clip e Speed select this if you wish to describe the retiming in terms of double speed or half speed e Frame select this if you wish to describe the retiming in terms of at frame 100 in the output clip want to see frame 50 of the input clip Speed this parameter is visible only if Timing is set to Speed Values below 100 slow down the clip Values above 100 speed up movement For example to slow down the clip by a factor of two half speed set this value to 50 Quarter speed would be 25 This value can be animated to speed up or slow down Frame this parameter is visible only if Timing is set to Frame Use this to specific the input frame at the curr
224. to motion and we discard them both replacing them with the global brightness and contrast parameters for the whole image The criterion for discarding parameters is set by Motion Thresh So if you think the flicker is only in parts of the image that are static it is quite safe to increase this value It s worth repeating this Where there is motion only global deflickering takes place You can view areas that are consid ered moving by turning on the Motion Matte Movement is shown in white as shown in Figure 11 2 Figure 11 1 Bus moving left Figure 11 2 Motion Matte to right If there is little information in the block for example in a plain area a region of constant colour it is difficult to obtain reliable estimates for the local flicker parameters We check for this by discarding the parameters for any blocks with a variance below Variance Thresh The discarded areas are shown as non black channels in the Variance Matte as shown The Foundry Furnace 86 DEFLICKER Copying Flicker Warning Inputs Parameters Flicker in Figure 11 4 For information on what the colours mean see Variance Matte in the parameters section Having obtained a reliable set of flicker parameters for each block these are then smoothed using a combing technique The number of smoothing iterations is set by Smoothness Figure 11 3 Bus Figure 11 4 Variance Matte To copy the flicker onto another clip simply load differen
225. trols how much effect Luminance Match has on the new texture Use Bias Matte switch this on to position pixels according to the colour of the bias matte Furnace The Foundry Examples 161 Roto Matte Crops Examples Exaggerate Bias determines how rigidly the spark follows the colour guidelines defined by the bias matte Smaller Segments switch this on to copy smaller texture regions from the sample area Let us consider the purple flower pattern With Smaller Segments off whole flowers will be copied from the source texture Switching this parameter on will force smaller patterns like petals but not whole flowers to be copied This can give better edges when trying to fit textures to a well defined bias matte Seed the random number used to start the texture genera tion process Change the seed value to see a different attempt at texture generation See Roto Matte Tool on on page 25 See Crops on on page 33 A variety of textures including the fox flowers and bark can be downloaded from our web site The Foundry Furnace 162 PLANARPATCHER PlanarPatcher Introduction Quick Start This chapter looks at using the The Foundry s F_PlanarPatcher plug in as a planar tracker to track objects into a sequence For hints tips tricks and feedback please visit http support thefoundry co uk F_PlanarPatcher uses the Foundry s advanced global motion es timation to track surfaces
226. trum by selecting Detail All e Large only the large scale grain is removed and dis played e Medium only the medium scale grain is removed and displayed e Small only the small scale grain is removed and dis played e All small medium and large grain is removed and dis played The image is decomposed into a frequency spectrum using a wavelet based technique The following tuning parameters will process the high Tune Small medium or low parts of this spectrum independently Tune Small increases or decreases the amount of small grain removed Tune Medium increases or decreases the amount of medium sized grain removed Tune Large increases or decreases the amount of large grain Tune Huge increases or decreases the amount of largest grain Temporal switch this on to activate temporal filtering where possible rather than the default spatial filtering If it is switched off just spatial filtering is used to degrain the image The Foundry Furnace 96 DEGRAIN Analysis Roto Matte Examples Motion Thresh the threshold above which the difference be tween pixels in two adjacent frames is deemed to be motion If you increase this value more areas will be thought to be static Motion Blending the amount of the current frame to blend with the previous degrained frame in the parts of the image that are not moving Motion Dilate grows the regions detected as motion when temp
227. ts Click on the spark you want to use The cursor will change colour prompting you to select images or mattes and finally a destination reel to put the processed clip The spark interface will be launched This will give you access to all the parameters that control the spark When you select a spark a letter S may appear on the button Pressing this S letter will launch the spark using the clips selected last time the spark was used All Furnace sparks run in Module mode The Module mode gives you access to all the parameters and animation channels for that effect Command mode processes the clip s without giv ing the user the opportunity to change parameters No Furnace sparks work in Command mode All sparks have some standard controls supplied by Discreet These are the three columns of buttons on the lefthand side the frame slider and play control buttons in the middle and the image window display controls pan amp zoom on the right The remaining controls depend on that particular spark Saving Sparks You can load and save your spark s current parameter settings from the Setup menu See your Autodesk Media amp Entertain ment User Guide for more information Furnace The Foundry 23 Common Controls Display Tools There are many controls that are common to the Furnace sparks These are all described in detail in this chapter The display tools can be found on the right hand side of the sparks interface
228. ucer and is likely to give better results on single images Apply F_DeNoise and select the Plate Size of your input frame note that this refers to the original size of the plate so even if you are working on a cropped part of a 2k plate Plate Size should still be set to 2k The output will now show the de noised frame To remove more noise simply increase the Tune Master parameter The results can be further improved by analysing the grain structure Move the on screen box over a plain area of the image To get a good result it is important that this area is free from image detail so no textures or edges Switch on Use Analysis to use the results of the grain sampling over the sequence To change the analysis use either change the analysis position or the Analysis Frame Furnace The Foundry Inputs 99 Inputs Parameters DeNoise Examples F_DeNoise has a single input the clip to be noise reduced The parameters for this plug in are described below Plate Size the algorithm automatically sets some parame ters depending on the expected size of the noise and grain which can be related to the size of the image As you may be processing a cropped region we do not necessarily know this from the image size Select PAL NTSC 1K 2K or 4K depending on the original size of the scan Use Analysis turn on useAnalysis to use the sampled grain to improve the noise reduction By default the algorithm as sumes tha
229. upported fffis 7 5 versions and later are likely to work Furnace The Foundry Release Notes 241 New Features 1 RigRemoval a new feature has been added to tell the algorithm to consider an arbitrary set of frames from which to reconstruct the background rather than just frames centered around the current frame If you know where the good frames are this can dramatically increase the time to result as the algorithm is not wasting time looking at pixels from frames that clearly obstruct the repair region Improvements 1 Kronos masking has been added to assist the algorithm understand what is foreground and background to re duce dragging at edges This feature has largely replaced the internal matte generated when Use Occlusion was switched on so you wont find this button anymore 2 Roto clicking once rather than dragging would generate a very small roto shape leading to great confusion In this version clicking once will not generate any shape You have to click and drag 3 Tooltips Onscreen tool tips added for many GUI controls including rotos 4 ReGrain grain is now analyzed throughout the luma range and a response curve is built automatically Bug Fixes 1 DeGrain processing could not be interrupted with tem poral switched on This has been fixed 2 Kronos shutter time parameter was scaled incorrectly This has been fixed 3 Roto these controls could not be saved and used in a batch sessi
230. urce image and move the red rectangle over the area of the image you want to tile Switch Source to Result to see the tiling The two most interesting parameters are Overlap and Blend Size This spark is fast so switch the update to Process Drag and adjust Overlap to vary the amount adjacent tiles are overlapped Look at how the best fit changes as you alter this parameter A large overlap is more likely to produce a better join The Foundry Furnace 214 TILE Figure 34 3 and Figure 34 4 show the effect of the overlap on some pebbles The pebble image is supplied in the tutorial footage The Blend Size blurs the join between overlapping tiles This can produce a better result on some images but if increased too much will generate an obvious soft join between the tiles Large textures from small images Tip Figure 34 3 Overlap O gives Figure 34 4 Overlap 40 straight edges between tiles gives irregular edges be tween tiles You may have a small image but wish to create a larger image using F_Tile Since all sparks require the input image to be Figure 34 5 Resize the same size as the output image the best way round this is to Resize and pad Figure 34 5 the sample texture to your desired output size and apply Tile to that Figure 34 6 shows a 400 x 400 pixel brick texture padded out to 720 x 576 pixels in Figure 34 7 Use Tile to sample from the bricks and create a 720x576 pixel texture Onscreen tool
231. ure of some purple flowers and green leaves The Bias Matte is a letter F in green and purple and the output of F PixelTexture is shown on the right The spark will tend to put pixels from the sample texture into the locations in the Bias Matte that have a similar colour Exaggerate Bias determines how rigidly the spark must follow the Bias Matte Increasing this value will follow the shape more Here s another example using the same purple flower texture The Bias Matte is a colour ramp Figure 24 12 and the output is shown in Figure 24 13 Furnace The Foundry Inputs 159 Inputs Parameters Texture Figure 24 12 Bias Matte Figure 24 13 F PixelTexture If there is an obvious colour gradient across the sample region switch on Remove Gradient and adjust Remove Amount until no traces of the gradient can be seen in the new texture If there is an obvious luminance change at the join between the new texture and the source image check on Luminance Match and then adjust Luminance Blur until a better edge match is achieved F_PixelTexture has four inputs an example of this is shown in Figure 24 14 The first input is the background for the com Figure 24 14 F_PixelTexture s four inputs posited texture SMPTE bars The second input is the picture from which the texture is sampled purple flower texture The third input defines the area that will be filled with the gen erated texture and composited over the firs
232. urnace on Discreet Release Date March 2004 Requirements Furnace is compiled MIPS4 and requires Irix 6 2 or later on R8000 R10000 or R5000 microprocessors fire 5 3 smoke 5 3 and inferno 5 3 flame 8 3 and flint 8 3 are supported fffis 7 5 versions and later are likely to work Adobe Acrobat 5 or later is required to view the PDF User Guide New Features There are no new features over the previous beta release Furnace The Foundry Release Notes 239 Furnace 1 0v1 Improvements There are no improvements to existing features Bug Fixes 1 Licensing an obscure bug in floating license code has been found and fixed that may occasionally have caused Furnace to become unlicensed Known Bugs amp Workarounds There are no known bugs This is the first release of Furnace on Discreet Release Date 15 September 2003 Requirements Furnace is compiled MIPS4 and requires Irix 6 2 or later on R8000 R10000 or R5000 microprocessors fire 5 3 smoke 5 3 and inferno 5 3 flame 8 3 and flint 8 3 are supported fffis 7 5 versions and later are likely to work Adobe Acrobat 5 or later is required to view the PDF User Guide New Features There are no new features over the previous beta release Improvements 1 Help the way the onscreen help is displayed has been improved for wide screen monitors Bug Fixes 1 Roto this tool can now output the roto shape as a matte 2 Roto in a keyframed rot
233. use the pan on the Source clip doesn t carry on as far as the pan on the Reference clip Since this will definitely need to be corrected by a spatial alignment set the Analyse control to Spatial You will now see the Source frame offset to lie correctly over the Reference You can experiment with the Scale Rotate Translate and Perspective toggles to see what gives the best match In this case Perspective is probably best You can repeat the match setup at other frames in the sequence Switch Analyse to None so that you re just looking at the current temporal alignment and go to frame 50 Click on Find Temporal Match this should choose Source Frame 95 for the best alignment If you don t want to selectively add keyframes but you want the spark to find a temporal alignment at every frame you can optionally rewind to frame 1 set Analyse to Temporal and hit the Analyse button This will step forward through the sequence performing a Find Tem poral Match at every frame Similarily if you wanted you could then rewind to frame 1 set Analyse to Spa tial and hit Analyse to find the best spatial match for the temporal match currently calculated Finally go to the end of the clip frame 100 Make sure Analyse is set to Spatial to give the best alignment and switch the Show popup to Show Normal Now switch on the Composite Ref to composite the Ref erence image behind the repositioned Source frame This shows how y
234. ut the box can be made smaller using the sliders If so you will get this warning in the shell SPARK F_ReGrain selection box too small at proxy resolution and a red box will be drawn over the selection region Inputs There are two inputs The first input Source is the image to which the grain will be added The second input Grain is the image from which grain will be sampled If the supplied grain stocks are used only the first input is used Parameters The parameters for this spark are described below Regrain Stock selects whether the grain is sampled from the input image Sample Grain or from a set of standard stocks 2K 4K aperture corrected and non aperture corrected stocks are supplied Although standard stocks are included it is recom mended where possible that you sample from the film stock you are trying to match e Sample Grain samples and reconstructs the grain char acteristics from the second input e lt Stock gt lt Exposure gt lt Size gt grain characteristics sam pled from a supplied film stock Common Fuji and Kodak stocks are supplied The exposure can be under over or if left blank non aperture corrected The size is either 2K or 4K pixels For example FUJIF500 2K refers to the grain characteristics sampled from a 2K plate of Fuji Film 500 film stock non aperture corrected Show sets whether to render the result or a test image e Test Plate shows a test image with the grain applied
235. ver the bus without moving the poster it will line up on frame 25 On the Crops Box control page set the X Crop and the Y Crop popups to Colour Back on the Main control page click Incremental on The Spark will now pause while it analyses interframe motion from the current frame frame 1 up to frame 25 Click on Invert Transform to apply the move to the Source clip otherwise by default we are applying the stablisation transform to the Source The Foundry Furnace 44 ALIGN Stabilisation 8 1 Process the sequence to generate the moving poster that we Can composite over the bus Exit the spark Now we must repeat this move on the bus matte since we ll need a matte to composite the poster over the bus Select F_Align again and click on the bus matte then the bus and the bus again and process Exit the spark and using Quick Composite layer the aligned poster over the bus using the aligned matte as shown in Figure 4 9 SOLGAR Figure 4 9 Poster on bus You can get a closer match by reprocessing with the onscreen selection box positioned over the bus on the left part of the frame only If you want to apply the same move to subsequent el ements like the matte you may find it quicker to first reload the Spark with the original clips and original set tings click Analyse off and then save the setup If you then use this setup for subsequence clips the same move will be appli
236. we will use F MatchGrade to match the look of two clips MikeWalking and MikeLightWand Download File MatchGrade Mike tgz Step by Step 1 Import the MikeWalking and MikeLightWand clips our goal is to make the image with the light stick lighter and more like the other They are shown in 18 4 and 18 5 1 Apply F_MatchGrade using the walking clip as the Source and Copy To inputs and light stick as the Copy From input You should get the result in Figure 18 6 on the next page 2 The result is slightly garish so decrease the iterations parameter to 3 the result of which is shown in Figure 18 7 The Foundry Furnace 134 MATCHGRADE Figure 18 4 Source image Figure 18 5 Transfer image Figure 18 6 Output image Figure 18 7 Output image Furnace The Foundry 135 MatteToRoto Introduction Quick Start Inputs Parameters This chapter looks at creating rotoshapes using Furnace s plug in F MatteToRoto For hints tips tricks and feedback please visit http support thefoundry co uk F_MatteToRoto is designed to take a matte from any source for example Furnace s MotionMatte or ColourMatte plug ins and turn it into a standard Foundry Roto which can then be exported as a path thus making it easier to edit The rotoshape is built by using a threshold for the main and edge points of the roto If the input matte contains more than one disconnected object you will need to use a separate
237. without a user in a non interactive capacity and shall not use such Software on workstations or otherwise in a user interactive capacity Licensee shall be au thorized to use an interactive version of the Software for both interactive and non interactive rendering purposes Finally if the Software is an Educational Version Licensee may use it only for the purpose of training and instruction and for no other purpose Educational Versions of the Software may not be used for commercial professional or for profit purposes Notwithstanding Section 2 Licensee may store one copy of the Software and Documentation off line and off site in a secured location owned or leased by Licensee in order to provide a back up in the event of destruction by fire flood acts of war acts of nature vandalism or other incident In no event may Licensee use the back up copy of the Software or Documenta tion to circumvent the usage or other limitations set forth in this Agreement The Foundry Furnace 246 APPENDIX B SECTION 4 OWNERSHIP SECTION 5 LICENSE FEE SECTION 6 TAXES AND DUTIES SECTION 7 LIMITED WARRANTY Licensee acknowledges that the Software and Documentation and all intellectual property rights relating thereto are and shall remain the sole property of The Foundry and the Third Party Licensors Licensee shall not remove or allow the removal of any copyright or other proprietary rights notice included in and on th
238. xtent any implied warranties may not be disclaimed under applicable law then ANY IM PLIED WARRANTIES ARE LIMITED IN DURATION TO NINETY 90 DAYS AFTER DELIVERY OF THE SOFTWARE TO LICENSEE The exclusive remedy available to the Licensee in the event of a breach of the foregoing limited warranty TO THE EXCLUSION OF ALL OTHER REMEDIES is for Licensee to destroy all copies of the Software send The Foundry a written certification of such destruction and upon The Foundry s receipt of such cer tification The Foundry will make a replacement copy of the Software available to Licensee Licensee agrees to indemnify hold harmless and defend The Foundry and The Foundry s affiliates officers directors share holders employees authorized resellers agents and other representatives collectively the Released Parties from all claims defense costs including but not limited to attorneys fees judgments settlements and other expenses arising from or connected with the operation of Licensee s business or Li censee s possession or use of the Software or Documentation The Foundry Furnace 248 APPENDIX B SECTION 10 LIMITED LIABILITY SECTION 11 TERM TERMINATION SECTION 12 CONFIDENTIALITY In no event shall the Released Parties cumulative liability to Licensee or any other party for any loss or damages resulting from any claims demands or actions arising out of or relating to this Agreement or the Softwa
239. xtreme sinc filtering gives excellent results but is slower to render than the others Reset Spatial resets the corner transform for the current frame to not move at all Match Grade switch this on to allow the plug in to re grade the colours in the Source frames to match those of the Refer ence frames For more details see the chapter on MatchGrade on page 132 Switching this on also enables the following control Iterations sets the number of refinement passes More it erations should produce a better match but will take longer The Foundry Furnace 72 CORRELATE Roto Mask Data Out Crops Comp Examples Belle Mask a mask can be used to indicate the area of the image to use during matching The area ignored is where the mask is black e None don t use any masking e Mask use the RefMask input clip e Roto use the embedded Roto tool to produce a mask See Roto Matte Tool on page on page 25 The corner transforms calculated See Crops on page 33 This page also provides the following controls Composite Ref checking this on composites the usual output the transformed Source frames onto the current Reference frame This allows the current Reference frame to be used as a filler for missing pixels after the Source frame has been transformed Comp Softness this control affects the softness at the edges of the transformed Source frame during the composite Comp Size in pixe
240. y and find the optimum edge between the two images that hides the join Try increasing Path Width to allow it to search for the opti mum join over a larger area or decreasing it to constrain the position of the join Increasing Edge Blend may also help to hide the join by blending between the two images Too high a value will result in obvious softness If you are working on a sequence turn on Temporal Consistency before processing The Foundry Furnace 206 SPLICER Inputs Parameters Roto Matte Warning F_Splicer requires three inputs Source 1 and Source 2 are the images to be composited together The third input matte is a binary matte that specifies which part of Source 2 should be composited into Source 1 The parameters for this plug in are described below Matte whether to use the mask input or the built in roto tools to generate the spliced area e Matte use the image input to select the splice area e Roto use the roto tools to select the splice area Path Width sets the width of the search region to find the best possible join between the source images The larger the path the more better the opportunity for the algorithm to find a good path Edge Blend the amount of blur applied at the join between the images A small amount is good to help hide the join on some images but too much will result in an obvious softness Temporal Consistency switch this on to force temporal con sistenc
241. y between successive frames Splicer is really designed to work with still frames not sequences If you try and render a sequence Splicer is likely to find a new best edge path for each frame which will result in boiling along the edge when the sequence is played Turning on Temporal Consistency forces Splicer to use the same edge path on every frame This is only likely to be helpful when there is little or no motion in the sequence F_Splicer with Temporal Consistency switched on cannot be distributed across multiple machines on a network render farm See Network Rendering on page 19 Luminance Match switch this on to match the luminance of the new texture with the luminance of the source region in order to help hide the join Luminance Blur controls how much effect Luminance Match has on the new texture See Roto Matte Tool on page 25 Furnace The Foundry Examples 207 Crops See Crops on on page 33 Examples All the images for the following examples can be downloaded from our web site Hedge In this example we have shot of a hedge where we wish to fill the upper part of the frame where there is no hedge Figure 32 1 Hedge Step by Step 1 Import hedge jpg and hedgeMoved tif using them as Source 1 and Source 2 respectively 2 Change the Matte control to Roto to draw a roto that covers the non hedge area 3 An example result is shown in Figure 32 2 but the actual result will depend o
242. y co uk Furnace s DeGrain spark is used to remove grain from a se quence You select an area from the image and the algorithm makes a first pass at removing the grain for you This initial result can then be fine tuned The aim of the algorithm is to remove as much grain whilst doing as little damage to the image as possible to this end we employ both spatial and temporal filtering The spatial filter involves averaging pixels within the same frame This can lead to the blurring of the image and so to keep this to a minimum a wavelet based technique is used that decomposes the image into a number of different frequencies and scales before attempting to remove the grain The high frequency spectrum can be isolated and processed using the Tune Small parameter The low frequencies are processed using the Tune Huge parameter Temporal filtering involves averaging across successive frames to try and remove the grain Assuming the image does not move this produces better sharper results than spatial de graining This is fine where there is no motion in the scene but generates temporal blurring or ghosting in regions of move ment F_DeGrain is able to adapt in these regions temporally degraining where there is no motion and spatially degraining elsewhere in order to keep the whole image both sharp and grain free The parameters are set automatically by analyz ing the image however manual tuning is also possible to help generate even
243. y to find the optimum trans form for all pixels and so to speed up the process the image is sampled with frequency Step Size and only these pixels are used to find the transformation Low values will increase the processing time but may give you better alignment Rotate switch this on if the misalignment transformation between the colour channels contains a rotation Translate switch this on if the misalignment between the colour channels contains a translation Scale switch this on if there are changes in scale between the colour channels Perspective switch this on if there are changes in perspec tive between the colour channels Filtering sets the filtering quality e Normal low quality but quick to render e High uses a bilinear filter This gives good results and is quicker to render than high filtering e Extreme uses a sinc filter to interpolate pixels giving a sharper repair This gives the best results but takes longer to process Use Region switch this on to align the part of the image defined by the analysis region as opposed to the whole screen Analyse Right the right position of analysis region Analyse Top the top position of analysis region Analyse Left the left position of analysis region Analyse Bottom the bottom position of analysis region Reference the colour channel to be used as a reference The other colour channels will be aligned to this channel The Foundry Fur

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