Powering Invisible VFX, with Paul Miller and Marco Paolini, creators of Boris Silhouette | TVAP EP44
This week it's been a real pleasure to meet Paul Miller and Marco Paolini - Software Developer and Product Manager behind the Oscar winning software, Boris Silhouette.
Despite advances in AI, manual rotoscoping and invisible paintouts are still an essential bullwark of the VFX industry and not going away anytime soon.
We begin our discussion with their work on Elastic Reality (used on classic shows like Quantum Leap) and talk about how they have built Silhouette for artists who need to paint 100 stokes a second and export mattes accurate to better than a 16th of a pixel.
Recently Silhouette has expanded it's compositing toolset so we discuss their choices around this. Of course machine learning is something cannot avoid discussing, so we look at both its promise and its limitations at the high end.
In closing both Paul and Marco give some excellent career advice for anyone entering or advancing in the VFX and Software Development industries.
Enjoy!
00:00:00 : Preview
00:01:39 : Introductions
00:02:20 : Founding the team
00:03:55 : Elastic Reality
00:06:51 : Original plan for Silhouette
00:07:43 : The Node Graph
00:10:56 : Marco's Journey from Artist to Software
00:14:01 : The Smallness of the Industry
00:20:05 : What Keeps the Team Busy
00:25:34 : The Scripting Engine
00:28:38 : The Decision to Add More Comp Features
00:31:28 : Performance and Paul's Nightmares
00:35:49 : Silhouette as OFX Plugin
00:41:15 : Limits of Machine Learning
01:06:26 : Retimes
01:17:38 : Paul's Advice for Aspiring Developers
01:20:50 : Learn Python!
01:22:41 : Marco's Advice for Getting into VFX and into Software
01:28:41 : Closing thoughts
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#Silhouette #Oscars #scitech #VFX #Podcast #rotoscoping #invisiblevfx
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