MISTIKA (& Mamba)
I had heard of SGO Mistika for a year or two now, but had never seen this mythical FX tool in person until NAB 2014. (Yet it’s on version 8 already?? Where have I been?) If you are in the same boat, Mistika is the tool that Weta has been using to color grade and finish The Hobbit movies. Working in 5k stereo at 48fps, you are needing to push through approximately 20 times as much data per second as a typical 2k finish. What kind of a system can do that? Mistika! How they are pulling such performance from a Z820 is really something – I would have expected Cray Supercomputer size machine for such a task. They even claim realtime 8k finishing!
I spent a half hour or so with one of the most enthusiastic demo artists I’ve ever seen, and was really blown away by it. The color grading tools are just amazing, and show a real fresh thinking. For example – when pulling a key, you can start with your basic qualifier key, but then use your grading tools (curves, etc.) on the matte itself, to refine the key even further. As super-energetic demo guy said, “in most grading tools you can pull a key, and then you blur it to hide the defects. Fuck that – my mother can blur her keys! In Mistika, we’ll pull the perfect key!” And sure enough – he pulled a key on skin tones, tweaked it a little further, and within a minute, it looked like a CG pass of nothing but the skin of a very high poly model.
But holy wow, the interface is quite overwhelming. They have a trackless timeline (in the upper left of the photo above) they call the desktop, that I still didn’t understand 30 minutes later, and I did not get a good look at the VFX toolset – which is based on nodal compositing model – but it appears to be quite fully featured.
The price tag is somewhere far north of six figures for the full Mistika suite – but if you’re doing huge Stereo HighFrameRate features, that’s a drop in the bucket, right? But here’s the part that I find most interesting…
SGO has a VFX software only tool called MAMBA FX. And it’s basically Mistika without the timeline, (or the crazy hardware for realtime playback, etc.) So, it’s theoretically, Nuke for Mistika. I can’t vouch for it’s capabilities yet, but like I said, it appears to be very capable, and perfectly integrated with Mistika. I believe Mamba FX is available for Windows and Linux, and the Mac version will be released soon. And here’s the kicker… the software only MAMBA FX package costs only about $300. Yeah – you read that right. A few hundred dollars for a stand alone nodal compositing tool. Does it work without Mistika? Yes! There won’t be any project compatibility between Mamba and whatever else you’re using, but you can read and write any of the standard formats – EXR, DPX, ProRes, etc. – so you just render out the frames and off you go.
My take on this business models is that they think they can give away the Mamba software, and provide training videos online – and while they obviously won’t make any real money on the Mamba product, but they hope people will use it and learn it, and develop a pool of artists that can support the Mistika “Hero Suite” with full compatibility. And hopefully they sell lots of Mistika systems, of course!
It’s kind of a long shot, I’d say (unless HFR features really take off), but as an artist who is questioning Smoke’s future, I immediately thought about building a workflow based on Resolve v11, with sending out VFX shots to Mistika and back. In theory, you could build a fully capable Finish suite for the cost of a new Mac Pro and related hardware, drives, monitors, etc… Not sure how wise it is to build a workflow on cheap tools, though – as SGO’s business model could fail, and Mistika and Mamba could both join the list of retired finishing & VFX systems…
Check out their specs and demo reels here:
More on Mistika here
More on Mamba FX here
(Mamba has a free eval version for Linux & Windows, but I’m in an all Mac shop – no access to a PC with a good grfx card. Anyone want to download it and give it a whirl? I’d love to hear about it…!)
WRAP
So… that’s about it for my NAB Report – my apologies for anyone hoping to hear about Maya, Mari, Scratch, Avid, Quantel, Red 6k, etc… there’s only so much time in the day at NAB…
One final note – big shout out to Fred Ruff of The Refuge, who was presenting PDX-VFX work at both The Foundry and Autodesk stages (and tossing out Refuge frisbees to everyone). Nice work, Fred!
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