VENICE, Calif. & NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Psyop, a bi-coastal, creative production studio, today announced that Psyop CTO, Andy Jones, and software engineer, Jonah Friedman, were recognized by the Visual Effects Society with the 2019 Empire Innovator award. The award recognizes their work in creating Psyop’s Cryptomatte, which has become an industry standard for streamlining VFX work since it was first implemented in 2015.
Cryptomatte was originally created by Psyop to give their post-production artists more control over their stage in the pipeline while freeing-up time for meaningful creative improvements to the final picture. Cryptomatte also gives directors more creative freedom to make adjustments during compositing that previously would have involved lengthy rounds of back and forth. Cryptomatte creates ID mattes automatically with support for motion blur, transparency, and depth of field, using organizational information already available at render time. This organizational information is usually names, object namespaces, and material names.
Cryptomatte’s industry-wide adoption comes after Psyop made the technology available open-source on GitHub in 2016. This triggered a far-reaching, organic, artist-led movement that prompted software such as Pixar’s Renderman, Arnold, VRay, Houdini, Redshift and Clarisse to offer native support for Cryptomatte. Other animation and VFX studios have since adopted Psyop’s tool into their pipelines as well.
“Psyop has always been a creative-first company. By eliminating the bottlenecks mattes created, we hoped to free artists to spend their time on high-level creative tasks, instead of spending it on mundane technical details,” recalls Andy Jones, CTO of Psyop and co-creator of Psyop’s Cryptomatte, “Working in support of creative… all creative, regardless of whether they’re at Psyop or not, has always been Psyop’s MO. The choice to open-source Cryptomatte was true to that spirit. The world needs more creativity and beautiful images -- not more mattes. The combination of vendor support and sweeping user adoption is proof that we’ve created something meaningful for the artists we work with and that’s incredibly gratifying.”
For more information about Cryptomatte, please visit our website at: http://www.psyop.com/news/19975/open-sourced-creativity
About Psyop
Psyop (www.psyop.com) is a creative production studio with a simple mission: to Persuade, Change and Influence audiences by crafting compelling work that viewers seek out and share. Celebrated for groundbreaking work that has earned Emmys, Lions, and Annies, Psyop specializes in telling stories and designing with meaning across all screens and mediums. With studios in New York and Los Angeles and a global network of creative talent, our drive is to create stories that matter to people whether in the form of commercials, shorts, VR experiences, real-time animation, games, web series, VFX or feature films.
