Boujou 1.0.(Software Review)(Evaluation)

Matchmoving made easy

Any digital artist who works with live-action footage has probably had to perform the nasty task of matchmoving. In theory, matchmoving is simple--in order to produce a realistic composite of 3D imagery and live-action footage, you match your 3D software's virtual camera to the real camera used in the shot. In practice, however, matchmoving can be a nightmare, because first you need to deduce where the real camera was located and what type of lens was used when the footage was shot. After that comes the arduous task of matching the virtual camera frame by frame to the real camera.

Over the years, software manufacturers have developed a number of solutions for the problem of matchmoving, and most of these have gone a long way toward restoring artists' sanity.2d3's boujou is the latest such solution.

Software installation for boujou is straightforward, as is the program's interface. Along the top is a menu bar with icons for major functions such as Load Sequence and Play. Boujou provides a large window for viewing footage, and you can split the window to view multiple frames simultaneously. The Tasks window provides information about the status of the tracking process.

What makes boujou especially easy to use, however, is that it's almost totally automated. To matchmove a scene, you follow several simple steps.

The first is to import the film sequence into boujou. The software supports a variety of formats, including AVI, Targa, Cineon, JPG, TIF, and many more. (Conspicuously absent in the review copy, however, was support for QuickTime movies. According to 2d3, this feature will be added in Version 1.1.) The software provides a dialog box for user-supplied information about the camera, such as lens focal length. Although optional, such information will be available to users in most production situations, and providing it to boujou helps speed up the process.

After the sequence is loaded, it is displayed on the screen. Before boujou can begin tracking, you need to tell it what to track. The software guides you through this process by flagging steps with diamondshaped icons. Three steps--Track Features, Track Camera, and Export--are flagged with three diamonds because they are critical to the process. Other steps, such as Describe Cameras, Import Image Hints, and Visualize Tracking Results, are marked with one or two diamonds and are optional.