Comprehensive Map Database

At the heart of Viz World is the comprehensive Collins Bartholomew database of the world, defining countries, towns, and other features such as lakes, rivers, roads and railways. You can choose between a range of alternative projections for each map, with control over the scale and viewpoint.

Individual items can be selected from the database and incorporated into the project with complete control over their appearance.

You can also combine maps at different scales, such as to include an inset showing an enlarged view of one region from another map.

The Viz World database also include height information, from satellite images, giving you the option of displaying mountain ranges in relief to give physical information about the area being displayed, or simply for an impressive visual effect.

Street Data Configured Ready for Use

In addition to the database, Viz World Classic can also import street data in its own street data format. This provides a wide range of roads, railways, rivers and lakes, parks, buildings, and other municipal features, labeled and configured ready for immediate use, so you can create maps and animations that take you down to the level of towns, street corners, and single buildings.

Projects, Layers and Other Elements

Viz World Classic offers an integrated paint, rotoscoping, effects, compositing, and animation system. Designed around a powerful multi-layer approach, Viz World Classic is equally applicable to the creation of still images and movies.

When working in Viz World Classic, you are always working on a project. The resolution, bit depth, frame rate, and duration of the output movie are all settings of the project. These are set at the start, but may be changed at any time.

A project can be built up from an unlimited number of layers. There are five different types of layer: image layers (still images), movie layers, text layers, rotoshape layers, and map layers. All layer types have two components: the RGB image itself, and an alpha channel which determines how the layer is composited.

Image layers and movie layers also have an associated mask. The mask is essentially an additional single-channel image which can be painted and processed using the same tools as for the main image. Image layers have a single mask, while movies have a mask for each frame of the movie.

Masks can be used in several different ways: to protect portions of the image from change during painting or image processing operations, to define the arbitrary shape of an element to be cut from a layer (a cutout), to control the way in which the layer is composited, or to protect portions of the layer from change by other layers composited above.

Various other types of elements can be created and used within Viz World Classic. These are collectively referred to as overlays. There are three types of overlay: text, shapes, and cutouts (from an image, often using the mask to define the form). Overlays are not associated with any particular layer. They are retained as floating objects and may be stuck down at any time onto any image or movie layer. Alternatively any overlay can be converted to a layer for animation, and cutouts can also be converted into brushes for painting.

Establish House Styles for Consistency Across Projects

The Viz World Classic style sheets make it a simple matter to create map animations to a specific house style, and once you have created an animation changing it to a different house style is simply a matter of loading in the appropriate style sheet. Style sheets control all the important aspects of a map animation, including the color schemes, typefaces, line weights, and lighting or relief effects. The style sheets also maintain consistency across projects or between designers.

You can also create template files containing predefined elements, such as background maps, standard graphics, logos, and titles for reuse in a range of related animation projects.

Shapes

Viz World Classic includes a complete range of drawing tools to allow you to create and edit drawings directly within the program. You can create drawings by combining shapes in one or more shape layers, with complete control over the animation and appearance of each shape in the drawings. You can also add shape overlays to map layers, to allow you to highlight or annotate any features of the map, with a powerful tracing tool to allow you to construct shapes by tracing map features.

Rotoscoping with Shapes

Viz World Classic allows you to create, edit, and animate vector shapes. These may be polygons, B-Spline or Bezier curves, or freehand shapes. They can be used to create masks, rendered directly into images, or exported for use at a later time.

Shapes can be animated using a combination of key-framing of individual points and the movement, rotation, and scaling of complete shapes. This gives great flexibility when using shapes to create rotoscoped mattes for moving elements. The underlying movement of a feature can be captured by setting a few key-frames for complete shapes and then the shapes can be refined at any frame by editing individual points.

You can also soften specified edges of each shape, which is invaluable when making mattes to match something that is moving quickly and has motion blur on each frame.

Animation

Viz World Classic provides an Auto Animate feature that lets you add animation to your project by selecting a few simple options. You can fade objects in or out of view, and slide objects in or out of frame, with acceleration or deceleration to give a natural appearance.

For more sophisticated effects Viz World Classic gives you complete control over each component of your animation, allowing you to animate objects along an arbitrary animation path with complete control over their shape and position.

Compositing and Animation

Straightforward compositing is simply at matter of arranging the layers in the order in which they are to be composited, by dragging and dropping. Sophisticated composites can also be created very easily by using masks and alpha channels, and their associated controls, to determine how layers interact.

All layers remain separate and editable right up to the point of generating the final artwork. Layers can be moved, scaled, rotated, and filtered independently, can have any number of animated effects applied. They can also have independent transparency settings, drop shadows, and lighting.

Every image and movie layer has a selection of built-in keyers available for direct compositing using either luminance, chroma, or color keying. The quality of the edges can be carefully controlled to achieve the most convincing

results possible.

Every image and movie layer also has an integrated Roto Matte which allows you to add rotoshapes directly to the layer to cut out selected features. The results are displayed dynamically as you adjust the shapes, and the same flexible range of editing and animation options as for shape layers is available.

You can change the source material or content of any layer in a single operation at any time, without losing any of the animation or other control settings. This makes it easy to set up templates and then generate a series of images or movies

based on the same underlying design, but with varying content.

Painting and Effects

Viz World Classic provides a large range of painting, graphic, and image processing tools for use on image and movie layers. These are ideal for the freehand origination of artwork, or for retouching and editing existing material.

In contrast to the animatable transformations, lighting, and effects which can be applied to all layers, painting work explicitly changes the actual content of an image or movie layer.

A wide range of built-in and user-definable brushes are provided for work on images or masks, including color, offset merge, clone, drag, blur, and other effects. The brushes are pressure sensitive with user-definable profiles, and optional onion skinning facilitates accurate cloning, merging, and wire or rig removal.

Many tools are provided for creating, editing, and applying text, shape, and cutout overlays, and a very large number of different filters and effects can be applied. Any operations can be repeated over multiple frames using macros.

The changed material created by painting operations is stored independently, leaving your original materials unaffected. At any stage you can render a finished version, incorporating all your edits, or revert to your original material if you want to discard changes.

Sophisticated Lighting and Filtering Effects

Viz World Classic allows you to add lighting effects to each layer in your project to add realistic shading and highlighting to the images, or to emphasize specific features. You can also add one of a range of effects to the animation to blur images, or adjust the brightness or contrast.

High-quality Output

As you create your animation the frame you are working on is rendered complete with anti-aliasing to show you the quality of the finished result. At any time you have the option of previewing the complete animation, or rendering it at high quality as single frames or as a movie file to create a finished broadcast quality video.

With suitable video output hardware the animations can be played out as broadcast-quality PAL or NTSC sequences. The following video hardware is supported: DPS Reality Studio Digital Disk Recorder, and video output boards capable of playing QuickTime or AVI movies, or accepting single-frame-per-file output. Contact your local Vizrt representative for updated information about supported hardware configurations.