Toronto, Canada - Eyeon (
www.eyeonline.com),, makers of the Fusion compositing system, is partnering with Photron USA and Imagica Digix, bundling the Primatte chromakey software with Fusion 6.2.
Primatte was developed 15 years ago by Yaz Mishima at Imagica Corp. of Japan, which turned over the product to its sister company, Photron USA (www.photron.com), for worldwide distribution.
Primatte is used to extract a single-color background from an image and create a transparency matte. This allows the artist to add the extracted foreground image onto a different background - also known as chromakeying, used in film and TV post to composite elements photographed at separate times and under various conditions for use in a single scene. It's integrated into the Fusion GUI, which eliminates the need to jump between applications. Imagica Digix's Primatte offers what Eyeon calls "ultra precision, matte-control compositing."
A benefit of Primatte is the ease with which mattes can be pulled on images without undesirable artifacting and lighting difficulties. Using a proprietary algorithm, it provides high- end results with not a ton of time needed from the artist.