SUBMITTED BY LClem

May 24, 2003 — "We first took a look at Furnace early last year, when it was still in development. The wire-removal plug-in was the first one we tried out on Highbinders, a Jackie Chan film. Out of more than 500 effects shots we were doing, around 250 of them included wire removal. Many of the shots involved extreme camera moves with fast action and multiple wires. The wires went over almost every difficult background imaginable  smoke, water, moving trees, moving people, and most challenging of all, close-up shots of faces. Standard wire-removal tools tend to drag pixels in from either side of the wire. Although this method is effective in some situations, it can leave a subtle boiling of the image where the wire used to be. In one wire-removal shot we did, the character's face filled half of the frame with a thick wire moving slowly to and fro across the face. Given the shortcomings of existing tools, this kind of shot could potentially take two weeks to hand paint. We decided to try the Furnace wire-removal tool. To be honest, we weren't really expecting it to help, but on this type of shot, anything was worth trying. Training time was about five minutes, and then the operator was up and running. After doing a test over 10 frames or so, we were amazed to see that it was working. Over the whole shot, it managed to do about 80% of the work, and then a bit of paint touch-up was needed. This saved the operator more than a week's work." Much more at the link!