The Pixel Farm release PFTrack V1.5

The Pixel Farm have announced the release of PFTrack 1.5, a major release of the company's advanced tracking environment.
With over 250 new features, optimisations and UI enhancements, this release takes the software to new levels of productivity. PFTrack allows the user to work within a collaborative environment with no addition to an existing workflow required. Its rich feature set goes far beyond the simple match moving offered by other applications in its field.
PFTrack now includes advanced motion capture functionality, colour keying for easy masking of green/blue screen shots, improved Shake support - with corner-pin script export and eleven new export formats for other 2D and 3D applications. The motion capture tools allow multiple views of a soft body, such as a face, to be tracked using simple markers, which form an animated 3D point cloud that can be exported to a 3D environment. Uniquely, PFTrack 1.5 can now calibrate as little as one feature track in 3D.
Added to new features, the heavily optimised tracking and calibration core gives 30-50% increase in speed over version 1.1, making it the fastest tracking environment available. This technology now allows shots that would previously be impossible to track in any other software, to be quickly and simply processed, so enhancing functionality and speed across the production environment.
Working in tandem with other PF applications, PFTrack 1.5 is at the core of The Pixel Farms’ data centric workflow. No longer purely a match move application, PFTrack is a means to extract complex 3D data from footage that can then be used in many ways. Current PF applications, such as PFStable and PFBarrel utilise data from PFTrack 1.5 to enable processor free operations to be carried out, in a host compositing or editing application.
“Version 1.5 is the first release that clearly shows where we are going as a company,” said Richard Spöhrer, managing director of The Pixel Farm.
“PFTrack is the first of a number of applications designed to analyse film or video footage and produce a data representation of it. Using such data we are able to carry out any number of operations over the top of the footage in a totally collaborative environment. At NAB next year we aim to demonstrate a production workflow based on these technologies, that is set to redefine the way post production is carried out.”
PFTrack will be available from January 5 2004.
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