Pixel Farm PFMatchit

The Pixel Farm used SIGGRAPH this year as a platform for launching a new, inexpensive match-mover that the company hopes will expand its reach in the VFX market. PFMatchit stands out from the competition by taking a node-based approach to match-moving workflow, and it stands out from the rest of PF’s line up through its aggressive pricing. At $700, it’s an attractive piece of software.

PF Operations Director Simon Brett stressed that, despite the much lower price point (PFTrack previously sold for $5,000, but has now been reduced to $3,300), PFMatchit isn’t just a stripped-down version of the company’s existing tracking technology. “We reviewed the architecture,” he said. “This was designed from the ground up as a lower-end application pretty focused on match-moving.” He did say the next version of PFTrack will probably use node-based architecture as well.

The company’s SIGGRAPH demo of PFMatchit revealed an impressive motion-tracking engine that was able to work quickly and authoritatively with challenging footage, including a tracking shot against a plain green-screen background that would generally give match-movers fits.

PFMatchit is fully optimized for 64-bit system architecture, supports Python scripting, and runs natively on OS X, Windows, and Linux. It’s been in development for 18 months (its predecessor, PFMatch, was discontinued last year) and is slated to ship by the end of August. The full press release is online at StudioDaily.com.