It's 2007 and I've taken the opportunity of a week's break to start work again on the Something Real sequels, Broken Dream and End of All Things. I'll update those particular sections of the site when I have more to show but for now I'm just capturing all the footage from DV tapes and tracking every shot that requires Kasta. Hopefully, I'll have chance to capture the original digibeta tapes now that the technology and storage has caught up with my ambitions, but we'll see.

The big plus of doing all this two years after shooting (yeah, I know, it's the only bright side) is that I've now got the tools to do a much better job in a shorter space of time. I'm currently re-tracking all the footage with PFTrack 3.5 which Dinamo bought last year to do Con Passionate. We were able to use a beta version ahead of its final release and it proved to be a superb tool with plenty of options for solving very difficult moves. So far, PFTrack has managed to track everything (with a few nudges in the right direction) that I was more-or-less unable to do previously. Over the weekend I might go back and uprez all the footage for End of All Things to HD to enable a more accurate track. I have to deal with a lot of lens distortion on the eleven-minute shot that requires a bit of resizing during compositing and HD frame will make this easier. I'll be using Digital Anarchy's Resizer 2 for that.

Actually, the feature of PFTrack 3.5 I'm playing with at the moment is the optical flow and depth map extraction. I'd always wanted to add more fog into the scene so I'm going to try and use the tracking information to produce a z-depth image for each frame. It may not work but it'll be fun trying!

At Dinamo at the moment, I'm working with Llyr Williams compositing about 70 greenscreen shots for a Within Temptation music video. It's all got to be done by this Monday so things are very stressful. After that, I'll be working on a virtual environment for a short film that was shot with the Thomson Viper on the same stage as the one for Con Passionate. Both projects are very challenging - the music video is very pressured and the footage has a few issues, the short film needs high quality effects to create a completely convincing environment. Both are in HD.

Oh, and I've been summoned for jury duty for the end of February. Great!