Venice, CA and Paris — Lightcraft Technology and SolidAnim, developers of on-set virtual tracking equipment and visualization software, respectively, will combine their Previzion and SolidTrack product offerings in order to provide a full range of virtual production tools for the entertainment industry.
Both companies have entered into a mutual distribution agreement to sell each other's products in conjunction with their own products in their respective regions, thus supplying their customers with a single source for both optical and markerless tracking for real time visual effects and on-set visualization systems.
In today's cost sensitive production marketplace it has become crucial to both keep production costs down and speed up the finishing of visual effects-heavy shows. Filmmakers and television producers have found that they need to use a variety of tools and techniques to provide reliable and accurate camera tracking data for use in both real time compositing and post processed visual effects shots.
Until now they had to wait for post production to finish in order to view completed visual effects shots, or build expensive and complex custom solutions requiring teams of experts in order to see the combination of live action and computer generated backgrounds while shooting. To satisfy this need both SolidAnim and Lightcraft had independently developed their own approaches to providing affordable solutions for the tracking and visualization of complex VFX shots, including green screen compositing, 3D rendering, and complex camera moves.
With this agreement, both companies can now provide their customers with the option to use any type of camera tracking whether it is encoded cranes, optical tracking or markerless tracking while still using their preferred solution to visualize and composite the live action elements and backgrounds.
Both companies' systems have been used in VFX-heavy productions. Lightcraft's Previzion system has been used on the ABC series "V", "Once upon a Time", and "Pan Am" as well as the feature film "Alice in Wonderland". SolidAnim SolidTrack was used successfully on "Da Vinci's Demons" in 2012 and is currently being used by "Cosmos: A SpaceTime Odyssey" (2014).
In addition to its own SolidTrack product, SolidAnim will now be able to distribute Lightcraft's Previzion system in Europe (EEMA), while Lightcraft will distribute the SolidAnim SolidTrack markerless tracking system in the Americas.