Review of Silhouette: A versatile tool for vfx work

Silhouette from SilhouetteFX offers an impressive toolset that delivers professional matte extraction for visual effects. Now in Version 4.3.2, the software includes advanced rotoscoping, tracking, keying and paint. One important improvement in the recent version is the thorough stereoscopic workflow.

There should be no mystery about how Silhouette can compete with the roto features contained in other heavyweight apps such as Adobe After Effects, Nuke, Eyeon Fusion or Mocha from Imagineer. The folks behind the creation of Silhouette bring a lot of top level pro talent to the table.

Silhouettefx partner Perry Kivolowitz, for example, founded highly regarded Elastic Reality, which made a pioneering vfx package that enabled artists to create advanced special effects. (The company was later sold to Avid). Kivolowitz was a co-recipient of an Academy Award for Scientific and Technical Achievement for the invention of shape driven warping and morphing.

Paul Miller, Marco Paolini and Peter Moyer round out the company leadership. (Moyer was the owner and Paolini was the senior visual effects artist at LA-based effects house Digital FilmWorks, while Miller developed Avid’s AVX effects plugin architecture.)

Roto

Rotoscoping and matte generation are critical parts of visual effects and compositing work, whether it’s a large scale feature film or a television commercial. These linked processes entail extracting or isolating portions of moving footage. Of course, green screens and color keying are important and eliminate much of the often tedious work of rotoscoping, but there are times when you need to do it manually, and that’s when an app like Silhouette becomes crucial.

While most compositing apps including After Effects and Nuke have rotoscoping abilities built in, Silhouette’s Roto node brings advanced tools to this task. Silhouette doesn’t shut out these other compositing apps either, as shapes and other data can be swapped with each of these.

Depending on your preference, you can create masks in Silhouette using bezier curves, cardinal or B-Splines. You can also make multiple mask shapes on your footage, and each can be keyframed independently in the timeline. Moving masks can have natural-looking motion blur applied to them, and you can feather the edges of your masks for different effects. You can even vary the feather amount along each point of the mask, exemplifying the amount of control Silhouette puts in your hands.

When rotoscoping you’ll find it’s often better to create multiple masks rather than attempting to extract complex shapes using only one mask. That’s straightforward with Silhouette; you can access various blend modes, which gives you different options for combining multiple mask shapes. These include adding them together, subtracting them from each other, multiplying and difference. Each of these blend modes creates a different shape out of the compound masks. Masks can also be an outline.

Layers are also smartly done. They can not only help organize your shapes, but can also hold tracking information. You can adjust each layer’s transform, stereo offset, blend mode, blur and invert state.

Tracking

Silhouette also contains a motion tracker that can track a single point for position; two points for position and rotation; and multiple points for planer tracking. After performing a track, the data can be applied to your shapes so they follow a point in your footage, such as to track a star to the tip of a magic wand or affix a poster on a wall. Tracking data can also be used to stabilize shaky footage.

Tracking computation can be run forwards and backwards in your footage and you can base it on the luminance or the RGB channels. You’ll have access to averaging, tolerance and smoothing as well as pre-processing to help ensure a more accurate track. Tracking data can also be exported to After Effects, Nuke and Shake formats.

Paint

The ability to paint within a roto app is a plus, and Silhouette has you covered. You can touch up your footage, remove wires and rigs or just do some creative painting.

The clone tool is naturally very useful, you use it to paint on one part of the frame while picking up from another. In addition, you can color grade the clone source. That comes in handy since the area you are setting down might look slightly different than the source area you are cloning from.

Other painting tools include a color correction brush (paint using color adjustments); drag brush (smudge or smear portions of your image); an eraser tool (erases brush strokes); a grain tool (for painting grain); and a scatter tool. Of course there’s a good ol’ paintbrush with controls to set things like the size, opacity, softness and angle of the brush.

Keying

Keying is, of course, well, key to this sort of work. Silhouette has its own built in color keying tools which handles challenging jobs such as hair, smoke and reflections quite well. You’ll also find related tools such as compression de-artifacting and spill suppression.

You have the option of viewing composite, foreground, background, combined matte, primary matte, secondary matte or final output of the key, depending on the circumstance.

If you’re color keying you’ll appreciate options such as the ability to clip the white and black values of the matte as well as being able to shrink and grow or blur the matte’s edges.

Power Matte

Silhouette’s matte chops don’t end there. Power Matte puts a little magic in your workflow. With this matte extraction tool, you first define a few rough shapes on a piece of footage to identify the subject you want to extract from the background. Silhouette then automatically generates a high quality matte even on formerly tricky objects such as hair and fur.

Once you get the hang of it, Power Matte can save you hours on footage that might otherwise required tedious step-by-step rotoscoping. An impressive video about Power Matte can be seen on the Silhouette website here.

Stereo

If you’re moving into 3D, Silhouette provides viewing and editing tools that allow you to deal with the dual images from slightly different perspectives that form a stereo image.

After loading a stereoscopic EXR file, for example, you can roto, paint or key on the left view, right view or both views at the same time with Silhouette’s stereoscopic alignment option which lines up the two stereo images and negates the offset between them.

Then check over your footage files with Anaglyph Preview. You won’t need a specialized 3D monitor, since you can check your stereoscopic image using simple red-blue glasses. If you do have a 3D monitor, you can view the image in interlaced mode.

Scripting

For those with some coding ability, Silhouette can be customized or even automated via Python, a widely supported scripting language. This flexibility can be crucial when working on and rendering large complex projects.

Version 4.3.2

The latest version of Silhouette offers up several useful tweaks. While these might not seem earthshaking, it shows that the company continues to consider subtle workflow improvements to better assist the busy professional. For example, you can now trigger a script when loading, saving, or rendering a project, or override the output filename structure. On-screen controls, meanwhile, offer a more direct way to rotate and scale layers. Finally, the Nuke Exporter has been improved, allowing better data sharing between Silhouette and Nuke.

Conclusion

When you consider how thoroughly Silhouette is set up for roto work and how well it fits into the production pipeline, I think you’ll find it compelling (irregardless if you currently find yourself doing roto with another compositing app), and appreciate the sharp focus Silhouette brings to the table. The software runs on Windows, Macintosh, and Linux, and its price of $995 fits into most production’s budgets.

In addition, Silhouette plays well with others. After Effects users will no doubt find the Silhouette Shape Import/Export Plug-in useful, while Nuke users will think the same about the Nuke exporter.

With its advanced painting, keying, scripting and stereoscopic abilities, Silhouette continues as a useful addition to any professional vfx studio and has been used on high level Hollywood motion pictures. You can find more info about Silhouette on Silhouettefx’s website.

Tagged as: After Effects, compositing, extraction, keying, Kivolowitz, masks, matte, Nuke, roto, rotoscoping, Silhouette FX, visual effects