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Once you have the comp in done in your image editor with as little pixel and grain distortions as possible. Try the following. Note this does require a $5000 set of plugins http://www.thefoundry.co.uk/ Furnace (no not the After deffects set) and the $5000 program them run in. http://www.eyeonline.com/ or http://www.apple.com/shake http://www.d2software.com/ (and yes a few others in the $100k+ range) In fact I might even do the whole comp in my film compositor with the use of some other tools. Anyway. Comp elements use historgram matching to match elements in the shot that should have the same color ranges. (You could do a color overlay in PS.) Ok now you have a good comp with good edges or edge blending and light wraps. You completely degrain the shot with furnace (each element seperatly degrained) You then regrain the shot as a whole. degraining and regraining work on all three color plates seperatly so when you regrain the shot it should be adding basically another blending of the of the colors making them uniform to what the original piece of film would have been. Now you take that file and do a film out of that. That is a very simlified break down of the technique. Many of the steps for each step are left out. My basic assumption is that the software looks for irregularities in the pixels deformations, areas of transition, and color offsets in the comp. I would love to go up against this software. (not that I would win but it would be fun to try as long as someone else is paying for the film outs and scans :-).) OH and if your source and destination or supposed to be film you probably want a drum scan not a CCD scan.

Combustion is the desktop offering from discreet, the folks who make the ultra-expensive Flame and Inferno compositing systems. Same mind-blowing color corrector. Node-based compositing without the price point of Fusion or Shake.

Cleaner is another discreet product (bought out from someone else), but the previous poster made an excellent case for some alternatives.

The non-Apple compositing market is far from empty, even when you consider only sub-$50k products. I can think of at least 4, including our own Digital Fusion.

Alias|Wavefront had their Composer product for Irix, but that also died a few years ago.

However, there's still Digital Fusion by eyeon Software, at least on Windows. A Linux render node is on the way.

Actually, the primary use of Linux by studios is for render farms (both 3D and 2D). It makes a lot of sense there. But very few studios in my experience use Linux as a primary compositing platform - they use Windows & Irix primarily, with some use of After Effects on the Apple side for motion graphics.

Clearly, Apple wants to expand this particular market.

"Separating people from their backgrounds" is called "keying". Shake has no keying technology of its own, they licenced Primatte from Photron. I don't recall what RAYZ/Chalice used, but certainly keying was not the focus of that product.

If they wanted keying technology, they'd buy Photron themselves, or Ultimatte or Zbig (too late) or maybe even a compositor with its own keyer.

Though, truth be told, Discreet did recently shut down their entire Combustion development office...

#include "ShamelessPlug.h"
More info on Digital Fusion here: www.eyeonline.com

I'm sorry, how is this insightful? Because it bashes Miscrosoft? Halo hadn't even been released for the Mac (or any other platform). Microsoft didn't kill it, they simply released the X-Box version first to give it some leverage against Nintendo and Sony in the console market.

Of course there will be Windows and Mac versions of Halo. Microsoft likes money too much not to make them (and they have an investment in Windows and Apple too, remember?).

And Shake isn't a game. Large studios depend on it. And most of all they depend on its speed. Even the fastest PowerMac can't compete with a quad Xeon (Dual G4s barely manage to edge out a single-CPU Athlon, and are crushed by the much cheaper Athlon MPs). If Apple kills Shake on the fastest platforms, it kills Shake completely. Studios have deadlines to meet and they certainly aren't going to meet them if they're forced to use Macs for their render nodes. It's not a matter of price or even bang for the buck. It's a matter of bang, period.

I work in animation and post-production and I know what I'm talking about. Half the artists don't even know which OS they are running, and the other half doesn't care. They just want the thing to render as fast as possible. And if you don't believe me (it seems that I'm a troll for not applauding Apple's scorched earth tactics), check out this post.

Discreet, Eyeon and Silicon Grail probably can't belive their luck right now.

RMN
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