Powering Invisible VFX, with Paul Miller and Marco Paolini, creators of Boris Silhouette | TVAP EP44

This week it's been a real pleasure to meet Paul Miller and Marco Paolini - Software Developer and Product Manager behind the Oscar winning software, Boris Silhouette.

Despite advances in AI, manual rotoscoping and invisible paintouts are still an essential bullwark of the VFX industry and not going away anytime soon.

We begin with their work on Elastic Reality (used on classic shows like Quantum Leap) a dtalk about how they have built Silhouette for artists who need to pain 100 stokes a second and export mattes accurate to better than a 16th of a pixel.

You can see some of Paul Miller's original design sketches for Silhouette here.

Recently Silhouette has expanded it's compositing toolset so we discuss their choices around this. Of course machine learning is something cannot avoid discussing both its promise and its limitations at the high end.

In closing both Paul and Marco give some excellent career advice for anyone entering or advancing in the VFX and Software Development industries.

Enjoy!

00:00:00 : Preview

00:01:39 : Introductions

00:02:20 : Founding the team

00:03:55 : Elastic Reality

00:06:51 : Original plan for Silhouette

00:07:43 : The Node Graph

00:10:56 : Marco's Journey from Artist to Software

00:14:01 : The Smallness of the Industry

00:20:05 : What Keeps the Team Busy

00:25:34 : The Scripting Engine

00:28:38 : The Decision to Add More Comp Features

00:31:28 : Performance and Paul's Nightmares

00:35:49 : Silhouette as OFX Plugin

00:41:15 : Limits of Machine Learning

01:06:26 : Retimes

01:17:38 : Paul's Advice for Aspiring Developers

01:20:50 : Learn Python!

01:22:41 : Marco's Advice for Getting into VFX and into Software

01:28:41 : Closing thoughts

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