It has been a pleasure to finally have hcomp at work so I no longer have to work on edge with the shakes(shakin my fist at no undo or sequence caching). However I was wondering if hcomp will ever get a tracker node/functionality?

This is the one feature missing from the compositor to make it stand-alone.
Given the three third party solutions out there and their excellent results, you have lots of choice and support. All three work very well with Houdini as you know.

I agree. If it had tracking functionality it would be a great standalone compositor.

And paint. Tracking plus paint = wire removal

Cheers,

Peter B

and keyer (possibly one of industry standard)… track + paint + keyer
and speed, to be at least as slow as Afx, but not slower.

Yeah and those… ops:

Sorry for the hijack but a question about keying.
Have any of you guys applied the concepts of keying from the book The Art and Science of Digital Compositing?
It covers this in what seems like a good deal of detail.

As for the speed, if you spend a bit of time tuning caches and memory, it performs quite fast. Comparable to Shake. There may be a few operators that are slower. I would LOVE to get that feedback.
I don't know about After Effects.

Yeh keying could be a lot better. Something like primatte would be nice.

jeff,
I believe you like my mother! Always. I don't know too much about AFX but I'm rather familiar with Shake. If you, or someone else can kindly show how to tune Halo to perform similar to Shake or Nuke, it would be really helpful. The truth is I didn't give it a chance, I made a lot tricks with VEX, deepraster, CHOPs and so forth - and this is great fun - but whenever I tried to do something with a footage, I gave up.

I have to confess that Edward used to asked me for preparing benchmark comparison for Halo & Shake based on an old Shake test scene. I lost the file somewhere before sending it, then forgot about his ask. Maybe I'll try to it now.

I thought our requests were not very serious, SESI left that market and I think most of us are happy with that, as that means more hands for Houdini development .

The future is coming and is called GPU composting. There will be a number of premieres this year fully accelerated and realtime suites I suppose.

but whenever I tried to do something with a footage, I gave up.

I hear you.
I just spoke to one of our own internal staff and he echoes what you say. I will add this to the list of things I need to focus on.

I thought our requests were not very serious, SESI left that market and I think most of us are happy with that, as that means more hands for Houdini development

The compositor is a part of Houdini. If there are bugs with it, we will fix them. If there is need for a feature, we will consider it.
It is a part of Houdini. I am very interested in getting the compositor (I still call it Ice and/or Halo ) in a shape where you can rely on it to do slap comps, brights, some effects, etc. Halo/Ice was used on The Wild to do all approvals out of the Lighting department. Some of those comp networks measured in at over 2000 nodes. Perhaps Ken can chime in on more details here.

I would agree that there simply isn't enough tuts and vids on using the Houdini compositor to truly show what it can do today.

I would argue that the rate at which we are adding features to Houdini is clearly out pacing any of our competitors. I think the capacity is there.

The future is coming and is called GPU composting. There will be a number of premieres this year fully accelerated and realtime suites I suppose.

And I would agree, to a degree. That and multi-cpu support.

Oh and the future is already here. Check out Touch from Derivative
http://www.derivativeinc.com/home/home.asp [derivativeinc.com]
They are already doing real time compositing on nvidia hardware with Windows. Truly amazing. Been doing that for at least three years now. Maybe more. It's like having a real-time flame but way more flexible. Check it out!
If I only had enough time to actually get in to Touch.

I know that the 2D transform in Houdini is a lot slower than most, it's optimized for quality over performance. At least for interactivity, it could be better.

GPU-assisted compositing is now a more reasonable proposition now that video hardware designers have caught up with programmable shaders. Previously it was a real pain to try to do computation with the GPU. Now it's getting a lot more accessible.

Better keying, paint & tracking have been atop the RFE list for COPs for quite some time now. If development shifts back to COPs, those are very likely the areas that will see work.

Maybe you could add improving the rotoshape to the list.

It's nearly brilliant but just lacks a few features…

It would be great if you could easily turn a bezier handle into a linear point so you could animate between them, at the moment its a very frustrating job to do by hand, tweaking those handles until they are zero sized but not rotated badly is almost impossible in any reasonable amount of time. Deep paint had this feature years ago and it was very, very useful.

Also, sometimes dealing with bezier handles is just too time consuming and unnecessary but linear mode is too, well, linear. I'd like to see a nurbs curve in there too as an option, less points to animate but you can still get some nice organic shapes.

Finally, as a pie in the sky request, some way to insert new points into a shape as it animates. I doubt any rotoshape solution has this, and I have no idea how you could do it, but if you could it would be insanely good.

Simon
Finally, as a pie in the sky request, some way to insert new points into a shape as it animates. I doubt any rotoshape solution has this, and I have no idea how you could do it, but if you could it would be insanely good.

Don't remember Nuke, but in Shake you can easily add new point between two other animated in any frame. At least from version 2.3 up to now.

In that case, stick that on the list too and remove the pie in the sky tag

jeff
Have any of you guys applied the concepts of keying from the book The Art and Science of Digital Compositing?

I made some key tests in VOPs from the excellent concepts described in Digital Compositing for Film and Video. I got pretty good keys but I got stuck on despill.

Dragos

twod
I know that the 2D transform in Houdini is a lot slower than most, it's optimized for quality over performance.

It's so slow that it's unusable and I didn't figure it to have “better” quality than Nuke's transforms which are like 10 times faster.

Dragos

Simon
In that case, stick that on the list too and remove the pie in the sky tag

What would be pretty awesome though, is kinda reverse functionality, to be able to turn off key animation of some points -> turning on interpolation between neighbors. This is what happen in Shake for newly added point in frames before they were created.
The huge pain is that from now on you have to animate all of them by hand so quite often you finish with a very dense curve. Being able to turn off hand animation for some points so that Halo would interpolate them based on a curve shape would let me forget about them once I don't need those additional points on a roto curve.

This was a nightmare in difficult roto work like a full frame parson coming close to a camera.

Normally you have to use a few roto shapes in such a case and switch between them in proper frames.

digitallysane

twod
I know that the 2D transform in Houdini is a lot slower than most, it's optimized for quality over performance.

It's so slow that it's unusable and I didn't figure it to have “better” quality than Nuke's transforms which are like 10 times faster.
Dragos

Well, anything else doesn't really matters, that's why I hardly believe this is a case of bug fix or polish roto tools or adding keyer, tracker etc.

The main idea describing a good composition application is called responsiveness - as I see it. Good compositor can lack of some features (and Shake surly does) but above requirement is a must. While Houdini is not a master in that respect for in most areas, it doesn't pain too much because of its procedural nature. In compositor it does pain. That's why I suspect the Houdini's architecture is somehow against compositing inside it. I really hope I'm wrong though.

I remember Rayz, do you? Didn't that code come somehow from SESI..? The fastest viewer on Wild Wild West…

I remember Rayz, do you? Wink Didn't that code come somehow from SESI..? The fastest viewer on Wild Wild West…

Rayz was built on top of Halo. Lots of great building.
Then Apple bought it along with Shake.

jeff

I remember Rayz, do you? Wink Didn't that code come somehow from SESI..? The fastest viewer on Wild Wild West…

Rayz was built on top of Halo. Lots of great building.
Then Apple bought it along with Shake.

So, there is some rayz' spark at the bottom of a wardrobe

jeff
Rayz was built on top of Halo. Lots of great building.
Then Apple bought it along with Shake.

I thought Rayz was built from scratch and that Chalice, it's predecessor, was started from SESI code.
Anyway, Rayz was awesome.