Serious Magic's Ultra2
By: Leland - Lede - Ede
It’s more fun shooting green screen footage than actually compositing your footage with background materials. The other day my friend and I ran across a program that claims it can make your life easier with a click of a button. Building clean masks for footage is used a lot in today’s featured films to put actors in worlds that don’t exists or is to expensive to shoot on location. We sent off a request to get a Demo copy of Ultra 2 (www.seriousmagic.com) after watching their videos. They claim to have a one button click solution process that will go through your footage and automatically cut the actors out. Their demo version of the software water marks your footage but at least you can try the program before deciding if it’s worth the $ 500 dollars.
Finally after a hefty 250 mb download we had the file to install with the provided new demo key. It probably would have been a smaller download if they broke the package into separate program and examples files but its an all in one download. The footage they provide has some good examples so it is worth the download.
Installing was interesting. At the end it popped up an info box with the number 1 in it and only an ok button. Not sure what that was all about but hitting OK didn’t blow up my computer. Next we saw the new icon on the desktop, double clicked it and launched the program.
When it opened we had an already defined scene ready for preview. It worked perfectly except it was using their footage. So we hiked over to the server and grabbed some crazy video we had recorded a few weeks ago. Within seconds we had something to play with that at least showed some promise. There are several easy ways to get your footage into the program that makes working with Windows and Ultra 2 seamless. Dragging your media from any folder into the project window was a nice feature. One thing to note here is if you have some crazy named files it might have a hard time loading them. My buddy had grabbed some images off google but we could not load them into Ultra2 until we renamed them.
