The awards recognise the very best product innovations at IBC, and the judging team hunted for new products that clearly showed the potential for end users to either make or save money. The Foundry’s Ocula caught the judges eyes as it offers the potential to greatly reduce the man-hours required on many VFX stereo shots by providing the technology to automatically transfer changes and adjustments made on one eye channel across to the other.
Ocula’s toolset is based on brand new disparity-mapping algorithms, created by The Foundry’s Academy Award®-winning R&D team. Disparity maps track and correlate the differences in positional space and movement between corresponding pixels in the left and right cameras, delivering users with pixel-level control over images.
Knowing where disparities occur, Ocula tools apply corrections by warping, stretching and squeezing only the areas of an image that require treatment. Image manipulation using disparity maps is different to X, Y or Z-axis shifting of images, where only whole image planes are shifted.
Bernat Aragones, film editor at Barcelona post production company Apuntolapospo, commented, “We think Ocula was one of the most interesting products presented this year at IBC. Compositing tools for stereoscopy are really in their infancy, and there is a growing need from post production houses for 3D tools. The Foundry’s approach using the disparity generator is definitely the way to go. The use of paint and an efficient automated translation of masks from one eye to the other clearly addresses one of the biggest challenges facing stereoscopic compositing.”