The Pixel Farm help Minghella scale ‘Cold Mountain’

The Pixel Farm have announced their involvement with Anthony Minghella’s forthcoming movie ‘Cold Mountain’.
Set during the American Civil War, the film was shot entirely on location in Romania, stars Jude Law and Nicole Kidman and is set for release in December 2003.
The revolutionary 3D camera match-moving and tracking environment, PFTrack from The Pixel Farm, was used extensively during post-production enabling 15 2K plates, averaging 500 frames each, to be tracked quickly and precisely. PFTrack provides a suite of tools to extract and re-purpose shot data in to an innovative new cross project pipeline design.
Dennis Lowe, Visual Effects Supervisor on Cold Mountain said: “I had been involved with the beta programme of PFTrack and saw that it was not only affordable, but an incredibly powerful piece of software. It was hugely beneficial to me, as the application has been designed around the complexities associated with long form projects such as Cold Mountain. Unique features, including batch processing and image manipulation tools resulted in zero duplication of clip data, which ultimately reduced the storage, network and hardware requirements across the project.
I was able to export the project into 3DS Max, ‘re-shoot' the replacement backgrounds and then seamlessly composite them into the required sequences, with tools such as the 'multiple output paths' feature permitting me to do this. PFTrack enabled me to achieve the desired look for this project and saved time as well, which was crucial in this production as we had so much to get through”
Michael Lancaster, Project Director at The Pixel Farm, added: "We are thrilled Dennis chose to use PFTrack on such a prestigious project as Anthony Minghella's Cold Mountain.
"The product design specifications for PFTrack and other upcoming Pixel Farm products have been developed with long form projects, working across collaborative environments, and we are delighted that our toolsets have been used to such great effect in what looks to be one of the finest films for years.”
As well as the ability to carry out match move and general tracking tasks, the data generated by PFTrack can be re-purposed in other parts of the production pipeline. Currently The Pixel Farm is shipping PFBarrel and PFStable, which correct lens distortion and camera shake respectively. Both PFBarrel and PFStable are designed to work in third party compositing applications such as Shake, Digital Fusion and After Effects.
(GB)