Imagineer Systems unveils monet product

Imagineer Systems has announced that it will be showing monet, its new product for broadcast, film and video postproduction, for the first time at NAB in Las Vegas.
monet is a start-to-finish solution for inserting images (moving and still) into moving footage, with a combination of tools that allow artists to handle everything for complex logo replacements, product packaging alterations, and product placement into moving footage, whether it be DV, SD, HD or film. The significant time savings the solution offers are expected to be especially interesting for broadcasters and commercial postproduction facilities who are often faced with these challenges.
The technology for monet was developed in collaboration with Cinesite (Europe) Ltd for use on the feature film ‘Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban’.
"The technology developed with Imagineer Systems is designed to anticipate and resolve issues involved in introducing an image plane into existing live footage," said Aviv Yaron, 2D Technical Director, and Simon Stanley-Clamp, 2D Supervisor, at Cinesite. "It addresses issues such as lens distortion, motion blur and scene lighting conditions and produces consistent and accurate track data."
monet as a solution has taken this technology on and includes tools for 2D plane tracking for motion estimation, manual augmentation of the tracking data without introducing jitter, lens distortion analysis, aspect ratio conversion, scene lighting condition analysis, intensity change analysis for identifying and applying shadows and intensity highlights, per-pixel motion blur application based on motion data, colour highlight extraction and compositing as well as grain handling capability.
"Our aim is to develop the next generation of intelligent, productivity enhancing tools for digital media. With our unique expertise in computer vision and image processing we are able to quickly deliver targeted solutions for post production facilities that solve challenging problems and reduce the time artists need to spend on boring, laborious tasks. monet was created with artists for artists and we are very excited about the benefits of the solution," said Allan Jaenicke, Managing Director for Imagineer Systems.
"Our approach of working very closely with a single customer in the early stages of development proved to be the right one, with both Cinesite and Imagineer gaining a lot from the relationship. We are now in a position to engage cost effectively with a facility when a specific solution is required by later bringing the benefits of the development to a wider market. We will be replicating this approach with other facilities."
monet will ship as a complete workstation solution that utilises the Accelera software acceleration card from Aspex Technology, to accelerate the performance of the image processing functions of the application, and offers support for video I/O cards.
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