KRONOS | After Effects Retiming & Motion Blur
GPU Accelerated Retiming Plug-in for After Effects®
The Foundry has created a Hollywood quality CUDA GPU accelerated retiming plug-in based on their Academy Award®-winning FURNACE algorithms: KRONOS 5.0. Use KRONOS for retiming, speed-ramping, time-remapping and slow-motion effects, plus the addition of realistic motion blur.
Retiming is useful when you have to make something fit an allotted time segment, or want to creatively move in "super slow-motion".
Blink: Real-time CUDA Acceleration
KRONOS 5.0 is the first product to use our ground breaking Blink technology. Blink is the framework which translates our algorithms to run on your GPU, in this case, utilising NVidia's CUDA technology. For more information on Blink, including an exclusive look at it running faster than real-time on NVidia's Fermi generation of hardware, check out the articles at CGSociety and Vizworld.
KRONOS: Quality and Performance
To create slow motion, new frames have to be generated. Just repeating frames results in very poor quality output with blurring and stuttering, and motion vector techniques have traditionally been very slow to render.
KRONOS produces far superior results by creating brand new frames using optical flow/motion estimation, and at incredibly high speed thanks to its ability to utilise your NVidia GPU for offloading processing.
KRONOS Optical-flow Engine
KRONOS uses clever maths to look at every pixel on each frame, and see where it moves to on the next. By comparing the two, it can make a very good guess at what would come in-between, allowing the creation of additional frames and a super smooth slow-motion result. This knowledge also allows KRONOS to add high motion blur to your clip based on the movement of objects within it. Inside KRONOS 5.0 we've additionally split out this ability as a separate plug-in, called MotionBlur. Both KRONOS and MotionBlur operate in full range float, to preserve your super-white and super-black pixel information.
KRONOS in action
The following sequence, by Alexander Lehnert of Haus&Gross communications, shows KRONOS used in AE to artistically retime a clip for visual impact:
View more examples of KRONOS retiming on the KRONOS examples page.
Platforms
KRONOS is available for the following platforms: