MatchMover Pro 4 in Depth Review
by Steve Warner

Stop for a moment and think about some of the most impressive visual effects you’ve seen recently. What comes to mind?  Micky Rourke combing the streets of Sin City?  Ewan McGregor floating down a river of lava in Revenge of the Sith?  Or perhaps Jack Black fleeing a dinosaur stampede in King Kong?

One of the reasons these scenes are so compelling is that they seamlessly blend live action with computer generated imagery.  The technique that makes this possible is known as matchmoving.  It is a lynchpin in the world of visual effects.  It is part science and part art and like most invisible effects, when it’s done right, you’ll never notice it.

Not so long ago, artists wanting to integrate computer graphics with real-world actors and environments were required to matchmove each frame by hand.  But around the turn of the century, commercially available matchmoving programs began to appear.  In the ensuing years, these applications have grown more powerful and easier to use.  Today, small studios and local boutiques have the ability to produce Hollywood caliber effects that were unthinkable less than a decade ago.  And it’s due in large part to the advent of matchmoving tools.  In this review, we’ll take a detailed look at one of the most venerated matchmoving applications on the market:  MatchMover Pro 4 from RealViz.

Setting the stage:  What exactly is Matchmoving?
Before we launch in to a specific review of MatchMover Pro 4, let’s take a moment to talk about what matchmoving is.  Matchmoving (or camera tracking as it is also known) is the process of analyzing an image sequence and recreating a virtual camera whose position, rotation and optical properties match that of the real world camera which captured the footage.

Matchmoving doesn’t require a dedicated program.  It can be done by hand in just about any 3D application.  However tracking a camera’s movement by hand is a tedious process.  It can take days or even weeks to obtain accurate results.  Dedicated matchmoving programs speed up the process tremendously.  By analyzing how stationary objects move in relation to one another throughout an image sequence, matchmoving programs can reverse engineer the 3D space depicted in the scene.  The results can then be saved for use in popular animation programs such as Maya, LightWave and 3DS Max.

Matchmoving programs make use of extremely complex algorithms to “solve” the unknown properties of the real world camera.  This is the science part of matchmoving and thankfully the user is sheltered from it.  But there’s also an art to it that comes from knowing how to direct the software and achieve accurate results.  The best matchmoving programs provide the user with a balance between ease-of-use and core-level control, enabling the user to obtain outstanding results in any situation.

MatchMover Pro – A first look
When you run MatchMover Pro 4 for the first time, you are presented with a clean, streamlined interface.

[Figure 01 – The default “Light Mode” MatchMover Pro 4 interface]