Developed by the team behind the Hotspring portal, the new Slapshot VFX app aims to significantly reduce the cost of high-end visual effects.
Leveraging AI technology, the app eliminates the need for hardware or specialist technical knowledge, allowing creators to integrate effects into their work via an intuitive interface, said the company.
The app launches with two core tools. Generative Retiming enables users to extend video length by up to 200 per cent, using AI to predict and generate new frames, while its Rotoscoping tool allows elements to be quickly selected and isolated to create exportable results in formats such as EXR, JPG, and MOV in hard and soft mattes.
Co-founder and CEO of Slapshot, Jon Mason, said, “One of the things we’ve spent a lot of time on is building a platform that can scale out to support a whole host of AI technologies, not just rotoscoping. There’s so much great research happening in this space that we thought it was super important to build an application that would allow us to onboard these technologies as rapidly as possible, and that’s exactly what we’ve done with Slapshot. It’s going to drastically reduce the time it takes for the latest research to make it onto the screen,”
Slapshot aims to make VFX available for a range of users including independent editors, colourists, content creators and more, as well as established VFX companies, allowing workflows to be streamlined in unique and innovative ways, said the company.
“If you’re an individual creator, adding VFX to your work has traditionally been too expensive. You just don’t have the budget to create the work using the toolsets that exist today,” added Mason. “We believe AI can bridge this gap, bringing down the cost of creating visual effects, and empowering millions of content creators to tell better stories. Most of the recent innovation in the VFX market has been focused on pushing big, expensive, manual processes a little bit further. With the rise of the creator economy, it’s time to make these VFX tools and techniques accessible to everyone.”
