Digital Anarchy has released Beauty Box Video 4.0. This upgrade adds real time rendering to the industry leading plug-in for removing blemishes and wrinkles from film, 4K, and HD. Beauty Box Video 4.0 adds in support for Nvidia’s CUDA, providing a big boost in rendering speeds on those GPUs. It also further refines OpenCL support and increases rendering speed on AMD GPUs. This results in real time rendering when using newer GPUs, like the Nvidia GTX 980.
“Beauty Box has been very beneficial to our pipeline, and has helped further improve the quality of the work we can provide and the timeframes we can turn shots around in.” said Darwin Go, VFX supervisor, Park Road Post Production.
Since 2009, Beauty Box Video has been a critical tool for dealing with skin and makeup problems that HD and 4K video reveal. It’s become the industry standard for doing automatic skin retouching and digital makeup. With Beauty Box 4.0, it’s now the fastest way of doing this, without sacrificing any of the quality it’s famous for.
Beauty Box Video 4.0 solves these problems by giving subjects an incredible makeover in postproduction, using state-of-the-art face detection, masking, and smoothing algorithms that preserve important details and the natural skin texture. All this combines to create realistic digital makeup. The retouching is subtle and the resulting video looks natural creating a look that is indistinguishable from real makeup.
HD and 4K show so much detail that it’s essential video editors have tools to reduce the skin and makeup detail when necessary. Beauty Box Video is a proven way of dealing with these very common problems. It automatically analyzes the footage for skin tones, creates the mask, and smoothes out the skin while retaining the texture. The video editor only needs to dial in the amount of smoothing on the first frame and then render it. It saves a tremendous amount of time when compared to how this is traditionally done.
“The only complaint we’ve had with Beauty Box has been the speed,” said Jim Tierney, chief executive anarchist of Digital Anarchy. “By using Nvidia’s CUDA and OpenCL we’re excited to announce that users will be able to achieve real time rendering. Making Beauty Box not only the best digital makeup plugin, but the fastest.”
Beauty Box Video 4.0 currently works in Adobe After Effects, Premiere Pro and Apple’s Final Cut Pro X. Support for Avid, Davinci Resolve, Assimilate Scratch, and other host applications will be following in the next month.
Beauty Box Video 4.0 is regularly priced at $199, but will be on sale for $149 until April 30, 2015. Users can upgrade to one host application for $59.
Beauty Box Video 4.0 runs in Adobe After Effects, Adobe Premiere Pro, Apple Final Cut Pro 7 & X. Support for Avid Media Composer (and other Avid apps), Davinci Resolve, Assimilate Scratch, Sony Vegas, and Nuke will be announced soon. The product runs on Macintosh 10.6-10.8, Windows XP – 8 and 32- or 64-bit systems.
Google Opens Its Defense In Antitrust Case Alleging Monopoly Over Online Ad Technology
Google opened its defense against allegations that it holds an illegal monopoly on online advertising technology Friday with witness testimony saying the industry is vastly more complex and competitive than portrayed by the federal government.
"The industry has been exceptionally fluid over the last 18 years," said Scott Sheffer, a vice president for global partnerships at Google, the company's first witness at its antitrust trial in federal court in Alexandria.
The Justice Department and a coalition of states contend that Google built and maintained an illegal monopoly over the technology that facilitates the buying and selling of online ads seen by consumers.
Google counters that the government's case improperly focuses on a narrow type of online ads — essentially the rectangular ones that appear on the top and on the right-hand side of a webpage. In its opening statement, Google's lawyers said the Supreme Court has warned judges against taking action when dealing with rapidly emerging technology like what Sheffer described because of the risk of error or unintended consequences.
Google says defining the market so narrowly ignores the competition it faces from social media companies, Amazon, streaming TV providers and others who offer advertisers the means to reach online consumers.
Justice Department lawyers called witnesses to testify for two weeks before resting their case Friday afternoon, detailing the ways that automated ad exchanges conduct auctions in a matter of milliseconds to determine which ads are placed in front of which consumers and how much they cost.
The department contends the auctions are finessed in subtle ways that benefit Google to the exclusion of would-be competitors and in ways that prevent... Read More