Silhouette Roto Ships

Silhouette FX, LLC is pleased to announce the availability of Silhouette Roto, designed from the ground up to be a lean, mean, roto machine. Designed and built by industry veterans, Silhouette Roto is available now as a plug-in for Adobe After Effects on Windows and Mac OS. The plug-in is also compatible with Apple's Final Cut Pro. A stand-alone version for Linux, Mac OS and Windows will be available shortly.

Rotoscoping (roto) is the process of manually extracting or isolating a portion of an image. It is one of the most fundamental tasks in visual effects. Silhouette Roto powers through roto jobs thanks to a user interface and workflow designed exclusively around the rotoscoping task. Beziers and b-splines are provided along with flexible and easy-to-use tools for drawing, reshaping, and transforming shapes. Shapes can be rotated, scaled, skewed / sheared, moved and corner pinned in a single mouse click. Silhouette Roto offers a multi-frame editing mode that ripples changes across a user definable range of keyframes.

Silhouette Roto provides very flexible, high quality motion blur and shape feathering (variable edge blur) that doesn't require an entire second curve to be edited. Motion trackers can automatically guide shape or point movement. Final composites can be previewed live as you work. Rendering is extremely fast, assisted by OpenGL(R) hardware acceleration.

Shapes can be imported from Elastic Reality(R) and Commotion. Shapes can be exported to GMASK files compatible with combustion(R), flint(R), flame(R), inferno(R), smoke(R) and fire(R) systems. When running as a plug-in, After Effects masks can be imported directly into Silhouette Roto if desired, and shapes created by Silhouette Roto can be fed directly back into After Effects as masks.

The plug-in version supports 8- and 16-bit depths. The stand-alone version offers float point processing along with 8- and 16-bit support. Color image files including alpha channels or alpha channel only files can be written to a variety of formats including OpenEXR. The stand-alone version also allows multiple sessions to be included in a single project. The company notes that the stand-alone version for Linux is especially well suited to making economical dedicated roto stations.

J Bills, Professor of Computer Art at the School of Visual Arts said, "Digital Rotoscoping will always be a formidable task, but finally we have a product worthy of the namesake. Silhouette has hit the nail on the head, with matting tools second to none. The seamless workflow with After Effects and Final Cut as well as export to the other major compositing systems makes this ideal workflow accessible to everyone. This is masking the way it was meant to be!"

Perry Kivolowitz, a Silhouette FX partner, said, "The industry, especially Final Cut Pro users, have been waiting for a high performance roto system that's modern and actively supported. That wait is now over." Company partner Marco Paolini said, "Silhouette Roto is designed by roto artists for roto artists. We think we've captured the unique nuances to make Silhouette Roto the fastest and most efficient way to roto!"

Silhouette Roto, as a plug-in for Mac OS and Windows systems, retails for $395 (USD). As a stand-alone application for Windows, Mac OS and Linux systems, Silhouette Roto retails for $495 (USD). Both the stand-alone and the plug-in can be purchased together for $595 (USD). More information about Silhouette Roto including system compatibility information can be found at http://www.silhouettefx.com.

About Silhouette FX, LLC:
Silhouette FX, LLC is a brand new company formed by the union of well known software designers Paul Miller and Perry Kivolowitz from Profound Effects(R), Inc. and visual effects industry veterans Peter Moyer and Marco Paolini from Digital Film Tools and Mark Coleran of Layerlab Limited.

Perry Kivolowitz received a 1996 Scientific and Technical Achievement Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for the invention of shape-based warping and morphing found in Elastic Reality. Over the past 20 years, Perry has been involved with many ground-breaking products in the digital special effects industry.

Paul Miller wrote the first version of Elastic Reality, a product that stood the effects world on its end. Paul has written dozens of digital effects plug-ins, available from many companies, used widely across the industry.

Marco Paolini has won numerous TELLY and Addy awards in his career as an editor and visual effects artist. While at Digital FilmWorks, his work has appeared in many feature films including "Anna and the King," "Red Planet," "Exit Wounds," "Moulin Rouge," "Collateral Damage," "The Last Samurai," "The Ring 2," and "The Terminal."

Peter W. Moyer is a three-time Emmy award winner, with numerous television credits, including "Star Trek: The Next Generation." As president and owner of Digital FilmWorks, a Los Angeles-based visual effects company, Peter has supervised the digital visual effects on dozens of feature films, including "A Midsummer Night's Dream," "Men of Honor," "Behind Enemy Lines," "The One," and "The Italian Job."

Mark Coleran is a motion graphics and visual effects designer for film and television. His clients have been as diverse as the BBC to The Cartoon Network through to the creation of computer interface graphics for feature films such as "The World Is Not Enough," "The Bourne Identity," "Blade 2" and Aliens versus Predator. He is also the founder of the online, commercial motion graphics resource Layerlab.

(C)2005 Silhouette FX, LLC. All rights reserved. Silhouette FX and Silhouette Roto are trademarks of Silhouette FX, LLC. Adobe and After Effects are registered trademarks of Adobe Systems, Incorporated in the United States and/or other countries. Mac OS and Final Cut Pro are trademarks of Apple Computer, Inc., registered in the U.S. and other countries. combustion, flint, flame, inferno, smoke and fire are trademarks or registered trademarks of Autodesk Canada Co. in the United States and other countries. Profound Effects is a registered trademark of Profound Effects, Inc.. Elastic Reality is a registered trademark of Avid Technology Inc. in the United States and other countries. The term "Linux" is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds, the original author of the Linux kernel. All other references to trademarks or registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners.