SGO celebrates another successful IBC with Special Award and continues to set the pace with exceptional new Mistika features
London, UK, 23 September 2011 –
SGO leads innovation across all dimensions and celebrates yet another successful IBC. One of the busiest booths in its hall this year, SGO attracted large crowds with exciting demonstrations of Mistika, including exclusive footage from high profile projects, such as The Blackpool Tower 4D Experience, produced by Sharp Cookies Ltd (Courtesy of Merlin Entertainments Group Ltd). The world’s major industry players from Hollywood, were also drawn to witness first-hand, Mistika’s remarkable capabilities.
Mistika Version 6.5 was presented at the SGO stand, revealing astounding functionality. A sneak preview of Mistika’s amazing new colour grading and Stereo 3D tools, advanced camera support and other developments were unveiled, and are summarised below as a general overview.
New Colour Grading Tools
With Mistika being chosen as the DI system of choice for the post production of Peter Jackson’s “The Hobbit”, SGO demonstrated a raft of new tools and improvements to its already very capable colour grading features at IBC this month. New functions include a fresh implementation of “printer lights” – a popular tool for many colourists as well as support for the new Tangent Devices “Elements” control surface. In direct response to customer suggestions to increase grading efficiency still further, Mistika now features new and advanced storyboard displays and greater control over saved grading settings. Additionally, Mistika now boasts an innovative “dual head” grading system, allowing the colourist to instantly jump between set locations on the timeline. All features remain constant whether working in 2D or 3D, and at any supported resolution or frame rate.
New Stereoscopic 3D Tools
Although Mistika is already well known for having the most advanced Stereo 3D toolset in the market, development in this area has not slowed down by any means, and there were even more impressive new features shown at IBC 2011. Although some manufacturers like to claim they have similar matching tools, the truth is that the range of stereo problems that Mistika can easily fix substantially surpass the competition.
In addition to the existing tools to change the inter-axial distance in post, colour match on a pixel-by-pixel basis to deal with polarisation issues, as well as provide one-hit, real time alignment for most simple misalignments, Mistika now has the following features:
- Auto-Match of Shear and Anamorphic Zoom: – Fixes distortions caused by an incorrectly fitted mirror in a stereo rig.
- Vertical Pitch Correction – Highly advanced algorithms to help with scenarios where the left and right camera pitches are mismatched, meaning that there is a vertical discrepancy that varies according to the distance from the camera. Also fixes many difficult cases of irregular distortion of a warped splitting mirror.
- Sharpening Soft Eye Feature – Focus mismatch of the stereoscopic pair can be fixed, salvaging many shots that otherwise would have to be discarded.
New Advanced Camera Support
Mistika continues to lead innovation by enabling the most advanced features of the latest digital cameras to be integrated easily into any post production workflow:
RED EPIC HDRx support : The camera creates in this mode, two streams of footage, with very different shutter times. The two streams then can be merged in Mistika, combining unclipped highlights form the short exposure stream with low noise shadows from the long exposure stream. This allows a High Dynamic Range (HDR) image to be formed which means that image information that would normally be lost in the shadows or highlights can now be easily recovered using Mistika’s colour correction tools. In fact, Mistika now includes a generic two-stream HDR merge effect that will work with many HDR sources. Advanced optical flow based process corrects for the time shift between the HDRx exposures. Mistika fully supports 5K and 48FPS working from the RED EPIC Camera.
ARRI ALEXA: Shown for the first time at NAB 2011 was Mistika’s own general purpose “De-bayer” algorithm that allowed real-time processing of the RAW image data from an ARRI ALEXA camera.
New for IBC 2011, this feature has been optimised and integrated into an ARRI specific process that allows real-time processing using Mistika’s proprietary de-bayer algorithms, but with the “colour science” provided by ARRI. This combination provides the best post-processing available for the ARRI ALEXA camera. Further support includes the ability for the S.TWO flash mags onto which ARRI ALEXA records its RAW images to be directly attached to a Mistika system and processed without further copying.
Mistika also enables direct 4K output for high resolution displays, and now, with the DVS Atomix Video Board, Mistika can play-out true 4K images to a suitable 4K projector or screen. Last year, Mistika added the ability to create DCP (Digital Cinema Packages) directly from its timeline. Mistika is now able to create Encrypted Digital Cinema Packages for enhanced project security.
And finally, a bit of “out of the box” thinking with Mistika Live – although Mistika has the best tools to align left and right stereo images, it would be better if this is done “at source” with correctly aligned cameras and rigs. However, the time it takes to do this manually can be very costly, as it puts the whole crew on hold. An amazing new function in the Mistika Live product takes two live streams from digital cameras, which are mounted on an Element Technica rig, and compares the two, to assess the error. It then actually sends commands back to the rig, to fix the problem at source, automatically.
Mistika Insight, SGO’s free educational training software module for students was also launched at IBC for the first time.
Another highlight of the show was the IBC2011 Special Award which was presented to Atlantic Productions with Sky 3D, ONSIGHT and SGO Mistika as supporting partners, for remarkable Stereo 3D production and post production of Flying Monsters 3D with David Attenborough,using Mistika, at London’s ONSIGHT. Produced by Atlantic Productions for Sky 3D TV and IMAX, the project was also selected as a Finalist in the Content Creation category for ONSIGHT with SGO. The IBC Awards recognise those who have made a real contribution to the industry. IBC TV news also featured SGO Mistika; as well as the IBC Daily News, which included the Special Award winners’ photograph, including SGO’s CEO, Miguel Angel Doncel, on the front cover.
About SGO
With Head Quarters based in Madrid, SGO is an established leading European developer of high-end solutions including its flagship DI and Stereo 3D system Mistika, and on-set application Mistika Live, for the post production and broadcast industries. A global company, SGO continues to expand with offices and reseller partners across the world.