• Price: 1400 . 565

  • Company: 2d3

  • Pros: Pro auto tracking at an affordable price, supports any resolution image up to 16-bit.

  • Cons: Not as effective with low-quality footage, and motion blur can cause problems too.

  • Our Rating: We rate this 8 out of 10 We rate this 8 out of 10

Boujou was the first automatic matchmoving solution on the market back in 2001. However, it cost as much as a small hatchback, so it wasn’t within reach of most 3D artists and smaller studios. 2D3 released the cut-down version, Boujou Bullet, to address the affordability issue.

Affordable is a relative term, though. At just under £1,500, Boujou Bullet is still far from cheap, especially when compared to other genuine entry-level trackers such as PFHoe from The Pixel Farm.

However, Boujou Bullet 2 should not be confused with an entry-level solution – it’s a fully-fledged production tool. It just isn’t as advanced as the full £10,000 Boujou 3.

Version 2 moves the application forward by doing away with restrictions on the size of image you can import. This means it’s just as suitable for tracking film-resolution shots as those from a DV handy cam.

Film support includes 16-bit Cineon and EXR format files (ILM’s format for HDR images). Other formats supported include MOV, AVI, JPG, PGM, PPM, Softimage PIC, SGI, TGA, PNG, TIF, and Maya IFF.

border=0 />There’s a quick and simple lens distortion option that lets you trace calibration lines on straight edges in the scene and then un-distort the image until the edge matches the lines. This data can be used to export a corrected version of the footage for use in your 3D application, and also to re-distort the rendered 3D sequence so that it will match correctly when composited with the original footage. </p> <p> <b>Racing track</b> </p> <p> Feature tracking allows you to add custom track points to assist the auto tracking. This is useful for bluescreen and greenscreen shots where there is little texture detail for the tracker to work with, and can also help in some frames that have too much motion blur. This new version has faster 2D tracking features than before, and while it does seem quicker, it can still take a while to compute. </p> <p> We tried tracking some lower-quality footage from a digital camera and it caused a few problems, requiring pre-blurring of the footage to lessen the noise and increasing the search distance for feature tracking. This increased calculation time considerably. </p> <p> <div class=floatedimage><img src= Print

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