SGO has announced another new version of the industry adopted stitching software Mistika VR, introducing keyframe animation together with many other new features and improvements. This upgrade is available to all existing
Mistika VR customers at no additional cost.
The latest release of Mistika VR brings the much requested keyframing feature, providing enhanced stitching flexibility and greater control of the VR 360 postproduction process. This results in a significantly higher final quality of the project.
Mistika VR is also now able to stitch Insta360 Pro footage at the highest level of precision due to the newly incorporated Insta360 Pro calibration libraries. This new tool facilitates the selection of a perfect calibration frame with the results being immediately applied in Mistika VR.
And a new Vertical Alignment tool allows precise user-assisted alignment, essential for VR180 shots, as automated tools in this field are not readily available.
Furthermore, storyboard icons are now saved with the timeline and restored at the project load preventing time-consuming recalculation of all the shots.
From Restoring To Hopefully Preserving Multi-Camera Categories At The Emmys
When Gary Baum, ASC won his fourth career Emmy Award earlier this month, it was especially gratifying in that the honor came in a category--Outstanding Cinematography for a Multi-Camera Half-Hour Series--that had been restored thanks in part to a grass-roots initiative among cinematographers to drum up entries. Last year the category fell by the wayside when not enough multi-camera entries materialized.
In his acceptance speech, Baum appealed to the Television Academy to keep multi-camera categories alive. He later noted to SHOOT that editors also got their multi-camera recognition back in the Emmy competition this year. Baum hopes that after resurrecting multi-camera categories in 2024, such recognition will be preserved for 2025 and beyond.
A major factor in the decline of multi-camera submissions in 2023 was the move of certain children’s and family programming from the primetime Emmy competition to the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences’ (NATAS) Emmy ceremony. For DPs this meant that multi-camera programs last year were reduced to vying for just one primetime nomination slot in the more general Outstanding Cinematography for a Series (Half-Hour) category. It turned out that this single slot was filled in ‘23 by a Baum-lensed episode of How I Met Your Father (Hulu).
Fast forward to this year’s competition and Baum won for another installment of How I Met Your Father--”Okay Fine, It’s A Hurricane,” which turned out to be the series finale. Two of Baum’s Emmy wins over the years have been for How I Met Your Father, and there’s a certain symmetry to them. His initial win for How I Met Your Father was for the pilot in 2022. So he won Emmys for the very first and last... Read More