Examples of difficult conditions include regions of frames with low lighting levels and poor contrast or other less-than-ideal shooting environments. The new boujou also enables the continuous tracking of features, even when they're obscured by atmospheric effects, sudden lighting level changes, or temporary obstructions.
Boujou2 also includes a new feature called Gold Tracks that allows a user to guide the processing of heavily stylized or compound camera moves so that automated tracking can be applied in the most effective way. Gold Tracks lets animators and composite artists assign priority to individual feature tracks, whether created by the automatic tracking engine, by hand within boujou, through the new interactive frame-to-frame tracking feature, or imported from compositing software. Designated Gold Tracks then influence the behavior of further automatic tracking and can also be used by boujou's statistical analysis engine to flag specific areas of an image for more detailed processing.
Boujou2 also includes enhancements such as a faster and more efficient tracking engine, context-sensitive help, and built-in animated matte creation tools for isolating particular areas or elements within a shot.
Boujou2 runs on both Windows and Linux operating systems. 2d3 also offers boujouVE, a "lighter" version of the product that is specifically tailored to the television production environment. The price for boujou2 is $10,000. boujouVE costs $5000. (2d3; www.2d3.com) -JD
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