Vizrt releases major update Viz Engine 4.1

Vizrt has released a major update to its real-time graphics and video compositing platform, Viz Engine 4.1.

Viz Engine 4.1 introduces multiple render blades, including support for game engines that allow media producers to choose which blade to use for any given job and mix and match them in the same environment.

“Perfecting real-time graphics is incredibly complicated whether working with augmented reality, virtual sets, or on-screen graphics,” said Gerhard Lang, chief technology officer at Vizrt. “It comes down to employing rendering technology like a scalpel rather than a mallet. Using the right Viz Engine 4.1 render blade for any given task while mixing and matching graphical elements on their existing Vizrt platform allows our customers to achieve world class results.”

New in Viz Engine 4.1 is the gaming engine render blade with its first integration, Unreal Engine 4. This development supports multiple inputs, improves performance, and runs simultaneously with classic and Fusion render blades in Viz Engine to bring the gaming graphics technology into functional broadcast workflows.

The classic Viz Engine features 600+ plugins and a rich feature set, which is said to allow it to be integrated and employed in any kind of broadcast workflow imaginable.

The Fusion render blade introduced in Viz Engine 4.0 runs in parallel with the classic Viz Engine render blade and supports ‘physically based rendering’ (PBR) plus a wide variety of photorealistic capabilities. This provides a further layer of engagement and realism, particularly to virtual sets and augmented reality graphic elements.

The updated Fusion keyer in Viz Engine 4.1 now fully supports HDR. The multi-matte Fusion keyer, upgraded with 16-bit colour difference, is said to deliver accurate keying even in the most challenging environments. Media producers can, according to Vizrt, precisely immerse their presenter into a virtual environment, giving a clean, unobtrusive key with ultra-realistic results. The updated Fusion keyer also offers enhanced de-noising and detail preservation, edge compensation, preservation of fine details, transparent objects and full colour adjustment using lift, gamma and gain.

The new video I/O system in Viz Engine 4.1 delivers parallel processing of colour conversion, de-interlacing, and chroma keying on input streams, giving render blades more time to compute advanced effects for improved performance. Dynamic channels functionality enables mixing of different inputs including ST 2110, NDI, and SDI in the same workflow. This delivers complete flexibility in usage of inputs and allows users to manage their resource usage much more accurately.

Viz Artist, described as a powerful motion graphics design tool, has been enhanced with a range of features to fully support designing for the graphics capabilities of Viz Engine 4.1 and deliver immersive and engaging viewer experiences.

Viz Artist 4.1 is said to put more photorealism into virtual sets and augmented reality scenes through the quick addition of post-processing effects. Furthermore, a shader development environment enables material and object shader creation along with adding post effects quickly to scenes. The Fusion shader plug-in, rendergraph editor, and shader development environment assist in creating photo-realistic effects or backdrops on videowalls and displays instead of utilising UHD clips, by modifying pixel and vertex data. Improvements to the substance shader plug-in offer added realism to scenes by allowing designers to use substances to generate textures.