Antimatter automatically isolates people from video
Virtual production specialist Vanishing Point has released Antimatter, an interesting new tool for automatically isolating people from video footage in post-production and visual effects workflows.
The software, which provides an alternative to traditional rotoscoping, works with video or image sequences, and outputs the resulting matte frames in a range of standard file formats.
Specialist tools for virtual production
Co-founded by former Framestore lead virtual production TD Ben Sharp, Vanishing Point specialises in virtual production tools.
Users of its other products – virtual production toolkit Vector, lens encoding system Viper and lens calibration tool Calibrate X – include Ingenuity Studios and Framestore itself.
Isolate actors automatically from footage for post work or background replacement
Although it is also designed to be used on set, Antimatter is the first Vanishing Point product aimed at offline post-production, automatically isolating people from footage for grading, effects or background replacement.
Like the machine-learning-based semantic keyer in Flame, it generates a sequence of mattes for an actor, making it possible to manipulate them and the background separately in compositing apps like After Effects.
It has a very streamlined interface, shown in the video above, with a choice of two preset quality modes for the matting operation, and a simple slider control to adjust the mask outline to remove noise.
Antimatter works with “any video or image sequence”, and can export the matte frames as a sequence of JPEG, PNG or EXR files, or as video in MOV, MP4 or AVI format.
There isn’t a lot of other information on Vanishing Point’s website, but if you want to try before you buy, you can download a save-disabled trial version.
Pricing and system requirements
Antimatter is available for Windows only, and requires a recent Nvidia GTX or RTX series GPU. A perpetual licence costs £595 plus tax (around $712 plus tax).
Read more about Antimatter on Vanishing Point’s website
Hat tip to befores & afters for spotting the Antimatter launch video.