I came across this product a long while back from a company called Silhouette FX, which appears to be some of the old elastic reality folks…not sure if anyone remembers them or not. However I was impressed by the features of Silhouette, so I thought I would share with my readers. This is not a review at any length, I merely want to describe what I gleamed as interesting, powerful, and done right.
Silhouette FX’s silhouette v3 is an application that does one thing, and does it extremely well. That thing is to provide the tools that you will need to generate a fantastic matte for your vfx work simply, quickly and accurately – thats it, and also what more would you need? To that end, silhouette provides a simple node based workflow where the major nodes represent roto, paint, effects, keying and composites while allowing you to generate, import and export tracking and roto path information from from your favourite workhorse compositor including adobe after effects.
roto: Silhouette allows you to create sophisticated animated mattes using Bspline, Bezier, or xSpline shapes, and masks include tools for stereoscopic work and workflows. Just to drive home the power of silhouette, you can feather a mask… well not just feather…the feather feature will allow you to feather parts of the same mask differently. Yes thats right, the same mask can have a feather amount of 2 pixels on one part of it, and 20 pixels on another, and 10 pixels on yet another. The feathering feature is not even based on where the anchor points exist, you can make new feather points anywhere on a path of your choosing, a feature that I often wished I had in after effects. The same flexibility is applied to the tracking features in silhouette. The integrated motion tracker can track a shape, or individual points of a path which is extraordinarily valuable.
paint: The Paint feature in silhouette is all high dynamic range and designed to handle the demads of feature film and television production by being fast, nondestructive and including stereoscopic workflow and tools. All paint functions are of course animatable over time through keys, tweening, and motion tracking of position, scale, rotate, and corner pin.
effects: The effects node allows you to apply any brushes available in the silhouette paint node as a filter effect to shapes or layers, and the filters parameters can be animated over time as well.
keyer: Silhouette’s keyer is quick and capable with minimal parameters including features such as dv/hd de-artifacting, multiple matte creation, color suppression, and sophisticated matte manipulation.
If you are an after effects user and are looking for something more powerful and quick in the matte creation area, Silhouette is the answer. It is compact, easy to learn, relatively inexpensive for small shops, and great at what it does. Silhouette is available for linux, windows and mac, and they are all provided as a downloadable install that you can run as a demo to try out. You can also see a little demo of some of the features in action here.
