Compositing is often a time-consuming process, but software can help do a lot of the work for you, especially tracking. Unfortunately, when a scene is particularly difficult and you're adding in parts from other takes and things are moving, it can be very hard to make things look seamless. That's where Disney's new DuctTake software comes in. They have developed a way to seamlessly composite elements of multiple takes into a single video automatically. See the software in action in the video below.
Thanks to Vashi Nedomansky for sending this my way, here is Disney on the new software they are calling DuctTake:
DuctTake is a system designed to enable practical compositing of multiple takes of a scene into a single video. Current industry solutions are based around object segmentation, a hard problem that requires extensive manual input and cleanup, making compositing an expensive part of the film making process. Our method composites shots together by finding optimal spatiotemporal seams using motion compensated 3D graph cuts through the video volume. We describe in detail the required components, decisions, and new techniques that together make a usable, interactive tool for compositing HD video, paying special attention to running time and performance of each section. We validate our approach by presenting a wide variety of examples and by comparing result quality and creation time to composites made by professional artists using current state-of-the-art tools.
Some of you may already be saying that this is pretty easy to do in post, but this software aims to do it automatically and seamlessly, which is absolutely amazing. Normally you have to do quite a bit of feathering or stabilizing, especially if the shot is not locked down. This certainly won't replace VFX artists, but it should make the process that much faster, allowing them to focus on more important or time-consuming tasks.
I think it might be some time before we actually get to use something this software or something like this, but the developments are pretty amazing, and there is no doubt visual effects is improving all the time.
You can find out more about DuctTake using the links below.
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