Much has been written about the impact COVID-19 has had on culture and the arts. This period has been an exceptional struggle — and there remains a long stretch of unknowns that lie ahead. In response to this struggle, we have seen our talented community of artists, designers and producers pivot so that they can continue to create visual art that connects with audiences at home.
Born out of necessity, ingenuity and determination, we have seen music videos, live VJ visuals, and XR sets all created in the constraints of lock-down. Thank you to our community of creatives for continuing to inspire us against all the odds.
Before COVID-19, we had a large body of research and feature development in flight for Notch 0.9.24 when it became apparent that this emergency was going global and would indeed stay with us for a long time. Much like our community of creatives, we knew we had to adapt our work to align with the reality of the situation.
Today our users can access a new set of features within the 0.9.23 release. These features have been created to support users as they deliver increasingly virtual and remote projects.
If you were looking forward to the features planned for 0.9.24 do not fear — it’s coming! We just wanted to make these additional features accessible to you today.
Download the update and see the full changelog here!
A game-changing Chroma Keyer
Green/blue screen keying has always been tricky to get right, freshly ironed backdrops, even lighting and the patience of a saint have always been pre-requisites of the artform. We’ve taken an entirely new approach to chroma keying. We’ve created a clean plate generation tool that produces fantastic results with almost no setup or tweaking required. Paradigm shift! Your source footage does not need to be perfect to key effectively.
“I was incredibly impressed with how clean the key was that we achieved with Notch’s new chroma key node. Real-time keying like this has made green screen virtual production a really attractive workflow.” — Rich Porter, The Hive
The new Notch Chroma Keyer is GPU powered and has the speed and functionality of dedicated hardware and camera units all packed into an incredibly fast, versatile and resilient package. The new Chroma Keyer provides all the features you would expect (and some that you wouldn’t!), including handling of transparency, high detail/thin objects (such as hair), liquids, global as well as reflection spill suppression, garbage and hold-up mattes and more. And all of it running in real-time (we’re talking 4K @ 60 FPS without breaking a sweat).
“Notch now has a best in class keyer for GFX, and of course — it’s real-time!
We are chuffed that we can save the hard disk space used for mattes and get on with the magic! — Nils Porrmann, dandelion + burdock
We’ve also created a series of tutorials that cover basic and complex keying situations. You can find them and more on our YouTube channel.
New streaming features
In the new world of streaming that we all find ourselves in, the Notch R&D team decided to focus on two specific features that would make using Notch easier for artists and streamers alike:
- Stream directly to online conference services like Zoom, Google Hangouts and more (supports any service that uses DirectShow). View the tutorial.
- Streaming to professional platforms such as Twitch, YouTube etc. via RTMP. View the tutorial.
Both of these features now ship with the latest update of Notch.
We’ve also added support for multiple (a maximum of four) video-in sources which enables you to set up more engaging Notch scenes that work with live video.
All-in on interactive
In our previous update to 0.9.23, we shipped a whole new series of interactive nodes and features. In this update, we’ve not only expanded on those but packed in an entire list of fixes and improvements.
If you work with (or want to work with) interactivity such as TUIO touch, audio, 2D LiDAR scanners or more, we’ve included samples you can load up straight from the launch screen. These new samples are a great resource for those starting their journey in interactive design.
Download and the full changelog
There are also over 200 fixes, added features and changes in this release, so we highly recommend you check it out!
Highlights include a new Image Tile File Loader, a large amount of Text Strings nodes, updates to new versions of 3rd party SDKs (including NDI, Kinect Azure, Real Sense 2 and Intel OIDN), improved Depth of Field, improvements to the real-time ray tracing Mirror Reflection node and much more.
