Correcting Rolling Shutter in Fusion

eyeon has recently released its Dimension optical flow and stereo disparity toolset. I didn’t have a chance to test the stereo part yet, but since you can now calculate nice and crisp motion vectors, I’ve written a Fuse that can correct rolling shutter artifacts. Here’s a quick demo video:

You can get real-time performance on your GPU using OpenCL and as usual I’ve licensed my source code BSD-style if you want to tinker with it.

I haven’t had enough footage from different cameras to test the plugin thoroughly (just my iPhone and a Canon 5D Mark II). I also haven’t tested any other motion vector generators except for Dimension. Maybe Twixtor works as well, we’ll see…

Download the plugin here: RollingShutter_v1_0.Fuse or head over to Vfxpedia.
Photo credits for icon: CC-BY Nayu Kim

Piwik Visitor Tracking

Let me introduce you to the great piece of open-source software that is tracking your every click around here. The traffic statistics of comp-fu, bildfehler and pfotenbild are created by Piwik, a free and transparent replacement for google analytics. I’ve been running it for a year now and it has matured considerably during the past few months. Right now, it doesn’t just show you which search engine and keywords have led visitors to your site, it also does this in real-time. The user interface is pretty and straight-forward and of course it will exclude your own visits from the statistics.

I don’t even use all of its features (it could also be used to set goals and track pre-defined paths across your site), but just the basic feature set is valuable enough. It allowed me to decide on the minimum screen resolution for my websites, whether to dive into the topic of iPad and iPhone-optimized CSS rules (result: not quite yet) and showed me useful keywords for the google adwords campaign that Pfotenbild is running. And it was easily integrated with WordPress and zenPhoto.

Eyeon Fusion on Mac OS using Parallels

Usually I don’t advertise random products for free, but this piece of software has really been a great investment: Parallels Desktop for Mac. It provides a virtual machine that allows you to run Windows and Windows programs inside Mac OS. Since Fusion isn’t available for Mac OS this is a great way to render my dual-boot setup (using Bootcamp to launch Windows 7) unnecessary in most cases. Note: This post is about Eyeon Fusion, not the competitor to Parallels – VMware Fusion!

But it doesn’t stop here. Parallels takes the integration between Mac OS and Windows even further. It provides a “Start” menu for the Dock which contains all Windows programs. It provides neat icons for file types that are used by Windows (e.g. Fusion’s comp files) and I can double click files in Windows to open them in native Mac applications. Great for PDFs or Photoshop files. It can hardly get more seamless.

Moreover, Parallels fakes a complete workstation and provides arbitrary folders on my Mac drive as network shares (X:, Y:,  Z:…) for Windows. It’s much more stable than Bootcamp’s HFS+ driver. And it allows me to easily mirror a client’s network infrastructure on my Macbook. I can just copy what I need for when I’m at home or on the road and all path names work like they would on-site. Of course it also works the other way around: Parallels provides access to the virtual machine’s C: drive as a network share within Mac OS which isn’t able to write to NTFS partitions on its own. The virtual machine’s C: drive really is a Bootcamp NTFS partition, so I can still dual-boot if I need my whole 8 Gigs of RAM for Fusion.

Having said all of this, of course there are some caveats. Well, only one so far, but it’s annoying nevertheless: keyboard shortcuts. If you don’t want Parallels to disable all Mac shortcuts while using a Windows program, you’re sure to inadvertently trigger unintended stuff every other minute (opening Dashboard when pressing F4, switching Spaces by pressing Ctrl-Cursorkeys or confusing the Command and Control keys). Luckily, important shortcuts like copy&paste are mirrored as Command-C and Ctrl-C, but it’s still a bit more irritating than using Windows with a real PC keyboard. It’s a general problem with using Windows on a Macbook though, Parallels or not.

Oh, there’s a second issue. You can launch Fusion easily using a Dock icon, but Parallels will boot Windows inside its virtual machine first and you’ll need to log in manually if you have set up a password inside Windows. There’s no free lunch, but Parallels still beats dual-booting in most cases.

Addendum (since I’ve got a lot of visitors from google reaching this post): Parallels doesn’t emulate a GPU that supports OpenCL, which means that many new tools in Fusion will either be slow (Volume Fog) or won’t work (OpenCL rays). If you need to render these, you need to use Bootcamp.

iPhoto

Playing around with iPhoto’s face detection. Its usefulness ranges from okay to funny to weird

Algorithms

Adobe demonstrates a future Photoshop feature called “Content-Aware Fill” that is the healing brush on crack. It’ll “extrapolate” image patterns to remove unwanted elements or extend landscapes.

Looks pretty amazing in this youtube video:

It’s probably based on some Siggraph paper. For example, the content-aware-resizing that Photoshop has since CS4 was also demoed at Siggraph first:

The algorithms that are currently developed in this field are simply amazing. Here’s the one that will put me out of work in a few years: automatic image composition based on a simple doodle:

Sketch2Photo: Internet Image Montage from Tao Chen on Vimeo.

Or this one on image stabilisation:

And finally this all-time favourite from 2007 (!) that apparently still hasn’t made it into a commercial product: An algorithm that seamlessly inserts high-resolution photos into a low-resolution video. Or removes unwanted elements. Or removes reflections. Or seamlessly changes what was behind those reflections.

Using Photographs to Enhance Videos of a Static Scene from pro on Vimeo.

iPhone Panorama Stitching

All photos on my travel blog have been shot with a 1st generation iPhone. The picture quality at the original resolution of 1600×1200 is lousy. However, if you scale them down to something tiny like 640×480 it’s actually alright for my purpose: posting them on a blog or sending them by email.

I wondered how difficult it would be to stitch panoramas from those grainy, blurry iPhone photos and those images in my previous post are the result. I used the free open-source toolset Hugin. It’s 0.8 version for Windows is a bit difficult to find, and you need at least that version for the photometric white balance compensation, so here’s a link to a pre-compiled EXE installer.

I’m amazed at how mature the imaging algorithms are, or that those algorithms exist in the first place (and I’m working with digital images on a daily basis ). Hugin not only managed to undistort and blend the images perfectly, it also removed the camera’s vignetting and compensated for the difference in exposure. This is an important bit because the iPhone adjusts its shutter speed automatically which is usually a bad thing for panoramas.

The only thing I had to do (apart from clicking two buttons) was entering the camera’s focal length. It’s not included in the EXIF data which is a bit of a disappointment. Maybe Apple wanted to hide it from other smartphone manufacturers? Well, google turns up the required data pretty quickly. The iPhone (2G) has a film-equivalent focal length of 37mm or a field of view of about 50 degrees.

Of course the final panorama doesn’t allow for severe color corrections. The colors are dull (it was an overcast day as well) but you could play around a bit more to create a more vibrant result. Anyway, it’s good enough for me to snap some more in the future for my Shanghai reports. Stay tuned!

Eyeon Generation 2 and File Naming Conventions

Just read about the upcoming release of eyeon’s next version of Generation. I’ve evaluated version 1 last year and while it was a really promising versioning and viewing solution for vfx shots there was one show-stopper for us: Its nifty incremental saving feature was hard-coded to a version number at the end of the file name. Since our pipeline had a more complicated naming scheme we couldn’t just drop Generation into it.

However, this bit from the press release sounds like they’ve made some improvements in that area although I’m not sure if that extends to incremental saves or just searching metadata:

A sophisticated search-function allows artists to define in-house filename conventions as a pattern and search by fields.

In case you want to know how that particular pipeline’s filename convention looked like:

[project]_[shot]_[status]_[version]_[artist name].comp

Yes, squeezing the artist name into the file name is naughty. And it’s just a way to cure symptoms, not to solve the problem. (The problem being lack of metadata about who worked on the most recent version of a packshot in case somebody else has to modify it when the ad agency asks for an updated version a few months down the road).

But it’s the best you can do without using a database or asset management system since it’s easy to use regular expressions on this and in a multi-OS environment it sorts nicely in Explorer / Finder / the console. A better way would have been to store this metadata inside the Fusion composition, and make no mistake, Fusion is indeed flexible enough to do this. But that would have meant circumventing the “Save As…” dialog with a custom script (did that too on a different job) and even then this metadata would have been hidden from view in Explorer.

But enough nerd talk for tonight

Keeping my data in sync

When I’m travelling around, I have to sync a few important files and directories across a Mac mini, a notebook running both Windows and Ubuntu and my iPhone. I still haven’t found a solution to keep calendar, contacts and e-mails across all devices because – call me old-fashioned – I refuse to put everything into the hands of a single service that forces me to rely on one vendor (like Apple’s mobile me) or stores everything on one website (like google mail/calendar or any IMAP mail service).

My contacts and calendars are covered by iTunes. They aren’t synched to my Windows/Linux laptop but whenever I’m carrying it around I also have my phone with me so that’s not a big deal.

For e-mail, I’ve been using Opera for ages and I like it. Its not good with IMAP but I can copy my whole mail directory from Windows to Linux to Mac OS and nothing breaks. So after years of using Total Commander to copy stuff between network drives I’ve finally found a service that takes care of all my synching needs.

It’s called Dropbox and offers 2 GB of free online storage space that is kept in sync across all three operating systems. I use it for my e-mail directory, my bookkeeping files and handy VFX related files like Fusion macros or scripts. It works perfectly and it is smart enough not to upload huge files again and again if only small parts have changed. Two additional features that might be handy: it will create an online gallery of jpegs that are uploaded to a certain directory and it allows you to share the contents of arbitrary directories with other dropbox users or the public.

Well, that’s enough corporate endorsement for today. But if you feel like opening up a Dropbox account too, kindly use this link which will earn both of us 250 MB of extra space for free