Imagineer Systems

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Imagineer Systems Limited is a software company that specializes in the development and maintenance of several Visual effects (vfx) software applications; that are used throughout all levels of film, video and broadcast post production. The company was founded in June 2000 by Allan Jaenicke and Philip McLauchlan; the pair had previously been carrying out joint research, at the University of Surrey, in advanced computer vision technology. Imagineer’s product line consist of monet™ placement station, mokey™, removal station, motor™, roto station, mofex™, plug-in for Shake and moxel™ - standards station. The applications pioneered by Imagineer innovate the method in which visual effects tools are used within post production; by developing mostly specialized (fine-tuning) applications, Imagineer created a versatile product base that was both multi-platform compliant as well as being compatible with other third party tools and visual editing suites.

The applications produced by Imagineer have been used prevalently within all areas of the film industry; with more notable uses in big blockbuster movies such as Casino Royale, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest and X-Men 3: The Last Stand.

[edit] Current Products

Imagineer currently offer several applications and plug-ins for distribution. For many of the core products a naming convention has been adopted: starting each application with the Letter MO (‘mo’ is representative of the word motion (i.e., Motion Picture))

The following are the stand alone applications produced by Imagineer systems; all of the following are available on multi platform (Windows 2000 and above, Linux Redhat, Mac OS X)

    • mokey™ Current Version: 4.1.0

Mokey is a standalone toolset that is used for removing wires, rigs, logos, scratches, hairs and other undesired elements in commercial, film and corporate video post production work.

    • monet™' Current Version: 2.1.0

Monet is a standalone software used to track and composite gor commercial, film and corporate video post production work. The software uses Imagineer unique 2.5D planar tracking and shadow/highlight extraction technology that offers a standalone solution for performing virtual product placement.

    • motor™ Current Version: (currently in Beta Test)

Motor, currently in beta test is a unique rotoscoping tool for commercial, film and corporate video post production work. This is a standalone tool based on Imagineer’s 2.5D planar tracking and spline technology, it offers a way of producing very high quality mattes faster than raditional tools.

    • moxel™ Current Version: 1.02

Moxel is a standalone software that is used as part of ‘standards and practice’ work, such as removing undesired branding and obscuring identities by using image recognition techniques. Plug In (available on Mac OS X with Shake 3.5)

Mofex is a set of plug-ins for Apple’s Shake compositing software for manipulating elements being composited, the plug in also supports application with lens distortion, allows the calculation and application of shadows and highlights and the application of tracking marker filter with adaptive anti-aliasing filtering warping and temporal median filtering.

[edit] History

Imagineer Systems was established in June 2000 by Allan Jaenicke and Philip McLauchlan. The pair had been carrying out a joint research project at the University of Surrey in Guildford, United Kingdom, with the aim of applying the latest computer vision research to the problem of image registration - the stitching together of disparate still image. McLauchlan focused on development of the core algorithms whilst Jaenicke focused on building a user interface that would allow a user to ‘stitch’ together spherical and cylindrical mosaics.

During some trials with video sequences McLauchlan discovered that the algorithms developed had a different and more useful aspect. When analyzing a panning shot of Stefan Edberg playing tennis, the algorithms quickly removed Stefan from the shot, computing a clean background shot. Some discussions with a manufacturer in the post production space revealed that there was a real need for such a product to perform wire & rig removal and so mokey™, the company's first product, launched at IBC2001, was born. Nearly two years later, in May 2003, the first glimmerings of the software that would become monet™ came to light. A technology demo led the internal R&D team at top London effects house Cinesite to conclude that Imagineer had the technology to solve a specific upcoming problem: namely how to efficiently insert the animated paintings into the picture frames in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. After an intensive development period working hand in hand with the Cinesite team, Imagineer announced monet™ at IBC2003, releasing version 1.0 a year later at IBC2004.

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