We are excited to bring you a brand new release of Pixotope. In this release we have focused on:
Unreal Engine 4.25
Keyer improvements
Improvements to the video I/O pipeline (including UHD)
Support for Corvid 44 12G
Easy usage of third-party plugins
Improved stability and multi-machine workflow
Support for Sony BRC-X1000 and BRC-H800 PTZ cameras
External DMX control of virtual lights
and much more
Pixotope 1.4 gives users access to the full power of the Unreal Engine 4.25.3, which includes exciting new features such as
DMX
Support for Anisotropic Materials
Physically Based Translucency
High-Quality Media Export
LiDAR Point Clouds
Ray Tracing Ready for Production
Motion Graphics Improvements
See Unreal Engine release notes for a full list of features.
Using the newly added de-spill cutoff control, in combination with the color intensity sliders, you are now able to better isolate the background color and protect the foreground colors that are chromatically close to it (like yellow and bright blues). We also made it easier to achieve cleaner shadows with an improved algorithm. To give a better blend with the background, the fill at the key's edge can be more reliably adjusted with changes to the luminosity equation.
We have upgraded our support for the AJA SDK and drivers to fully support the Corvid 44 12G. On UHD capable cards (Kona 5, Corvid 44 12G) we now support multi-format inputs, mixing HD and UHD inputs. In addition for UHD, we have implemented external key and fill inputs to enable using an upstream keyer. Last but not least, we have also made a number of performance improvements to the video pipeline to optimize throughput.
A major change to the functionality is to allow natively compiled third-party plugins to work seamlessly within the Pixotope environment. Any plugin from the marketplace, compiled against the same Unreal Engine version (4.25), can now be used in Pixotope directly without recompilation.
A big focus of this release has been finding and solving workflow related bugs, as stability in production is paramount. For setting up machines in parallel we have now added an option to isolate and only show and edit the local machine.
In 1.4 we fully support the newly introduced PTZ cameras from Sony (BRC-X1000 and BRC-H800) and include a lens calibration file for seamless operation.
We are supporting Unreal Engine's DMX plugins to control virtual lights within the Pixotope environment and provide an easy to understand guide on how to set it up, along with a DMX example project to get you started.
As ever, we would not recommend that you upgrade your Pixotope machines in the middle of a production or pre-production phase. This is particularly important as this release upgrades the Unreal Engine version to 4.25.
When choosing to upgrade, we recommend that you backup your existing Pixotope projects, so that you are able to go backwards if you need to.
Take your time to explore the new version, well ahead of a critical production crunch deadline. We are always happy to explain the new features if the documentation and demo projects don’t provide everything you need.
That said, we are really excited for you to get your hands on Pixotope 1.4 and to share your experiences with us.
For a complete changelog go to login.pixotope.com
We are always happy to explain the new features in a private demo.