Some of the coolest and most impressive visual effects are created by blending CG Imagery and live action. This technique is known as matchmoving, and can be found in many Hollywood caliber movies. Seeing live action seamlessly combined with scenes that are visually spectacular, yet unrealistic, is compelling to many. Today, small studios are able to take advantage of this and create those Hollywood caliber effects rather inexpensively.

When you open MatchMover Pro 4 for the first time, you are presented with a clean, streamlined interface.

Version 4 has seen a complete overhaul of the user interface. It doesn't have as much of a “Windows” look to it anymore. It now sports the “SFX” theme, which is comprised of a dark gray background and a handful of icons. The new layout offers enhanced functionality while increasing the available workspace. I like the colors, but you do have the option of changing most of the colors in the in the interface if you don't like them. The only exception is the background.  This may not be an issue for many, but MatchMover Pro does ship with an alternate theme called “System Default” which is lighter in tone for those who work in brighter lit environments.

After you've tweaked the colors to your liking, take a look at the icons. There isn't very many, but this is because when MatchMover Pro runs for the first time, it starts in Light mode. In this mode, only the tools needed for automatic tracking are available. This prevents new users from becoming overwhelmed as soon as they open the program up, and also frees up a lot of screen real estate.

To change the interface mode that you're working in, just use the drop-down menu in the upper left corner. When you switch to the Full mode, everything really opens up. Now you can create manual tracks, edit them, mask out sections of your clips, and set up coordinate systems. MatchMover also remembers what which mode you are in when you exit the program and will return to the mode the next time the program is run.

With any matchmoving software, you will be required to either track key points manually or the program will choose points for you. Some work both ways, which is how MatchMover Pro works. New to version 4, MatchMover utilizes the S.M.A.R.T engine (Scalable Matching Architecture for Tracking.”) This engine is faster than before, produces higher quality 2D tracking, and produces more tracks. The thing I really liked about this software is it's fast and easy…don't we all like that?

This animation itself is a brief “fly-through” of a town, and I have the camera going in and out of places, but the tracks stayed on the right point. I had a couple of problems because the animation had a lot of motion blur and effects going on, but I added a few manual trackers to balance things out.

One of the things that make MatchMover Pro really stand out is its robust manual tracking toolset. Manual tracking can be performed instead of automatic tracking, but can also be used in addition to it. If it's done instead of automatic tracking, the user must select and distribute enough tracks to inform the software of what's going on in the scene so that the camera can be properly calibrated. If it is done in conjunction, the automatic tracks will be used to strengthen the overall camera calibration.

Besides being able to track a point in the x,y,and z direction, you also have the ability to place keyframes anywhere along the image sequence for a given track. This ensures that the tracker will move through these points and gives you more control over your sequence.

Once you've added enough tracks, you can tell MatchMover to solve the camera. The program begins by choosing two reference frames and calibrating them. It then calibrates a series of keyframes that are added when you launched the solver. It then calibrates all of the middle frames. The quality of the calibration can be seen visually in the form of a colored bar at the bottom of the timeline ruler. You can also remove areas of the sequence by using contours.

Green areas mean the camera is well calibrated. Yellow means that the camera's calibration is questionable. Red areas tell you that the calibration is definitely off and something needs to be corrected. How easy can it get?!

MatchMover Pro supports most major 3D applications, including Maya, 3DS Max, XSI, LightWave and Cinema 4D.  Entire scenes can even be imported as an .obj. The only problem I ran into while bringing in files was with .avi movie files. Sometimes they would come in with nothing but black, and other times they didn't. It handled every Quicktime file and Image Sequence I threw at it flawlessly though. Once I got the footage in, I ran Auto tracker just to see how'd it go, and it gave me great results right from the start.

Conclusion:
MatchMover is an application that gets the job done fast and produces excellent results. It performs extremely well and has plenty of features to get you through some of the toughest shots out there. From a price perspective, there are more expensive and less expensive matchmover software out there. They range from around 400(SynthEyes) to over 10,000(Boujou 3). I'm sure Boujou 3 has great features as well, but I'd much rather pay 4000 for a product that gets the jobs I need done with ease. I spent about a week in this program, and I know my way around just about all of the main features and menus. Although the program is easy to grasp, it definitely doesn't mean you can't do a lot with the software. All-in-all, this is a great software package and I highly recommend it.

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