The Post Production Office, a Hong Kong-based full service facility, is running monet software alongside its existing Avid DS Nitris. As with many monet customers, the company bought the software for a specific job when it found its existing tracker of choice was under-performing, and is now using and benefiting from monet's many features on a regular basis.
The job, for multinational American company York International, required air-conditioning units to be tracked into frames hanging on a wall. Normally this would be a fairly simple task for any software, but the way the sequence had been shot made it tricky.
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"The problem with the shot was that the camera zoomed totally into the blue screens, resulting in all tracking markers ending up outside frame in a large proportion of the frames," explains DS Nitris operator, Christopher Thorp. "The Maya tracker failed us completely, taking three days to get a result that was not useful. With the monet tracker and tools for adjusting tracks it was a breeze to get a smooth track, even when the markers where lost. The track and composite were achieved in less than an hour and the results were great."
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Since the York job, monet has been used repeatedly on different projects. These have ranged from the simple screen inserts and label changes, that are the bread-and-butter work of commercials production; to more creative and challenging work such as tracking lip-stick writing onto the back of a coat. More of that sort of artistic expression is on the way too. "We're impressed by the generosity of the monet feature set and are constantly finding new ways of using it. Plus the support from Imagineer has been fantastic," says Thorp.
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The tight integration between monet and DS Nitris is a real advantage for the team, enabling them to export the layers rendered by monet straight into the DS for final compositing. "monet is great in that it is so open and flexible," Thorp continues. "I can export tracking data straight into DS, I can render various layers and bring those in, or do the whole composite in monet and then export to DS.
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"monet's 2D tracker is simply second-to-none. It gives stable, usable tracks much more quickly than I can get from any other package, especially when there are no tracking markers or the objects being tracked have heavy motion blur. The compositing tools allow me to generate highlight and shadow passes and add a level of realism that would have taken much longer to achieve on my DS," concludes Thorp. "This raises the quality of the result without costing the client extra and also makes me look good!"
For The Post Production Office quality is crucial for any client project, and monet has enabled it to give its customers higher quality results without blowing their budgets.