Avid Media Illusion was a digital nonlinear compositing software by
Avid Technology
Avid Technology, Inc. is a global technology company headquartered in Burlington, Massachusetts, and was founded in August 1987 by Bill Warner. It develops software, SaaS, and hardware products used in media and entertainment.
History
Avid wa ...
targeted at the film and television markets. It ran on
Silicon Graphics
Silicon Graphics, Inc. (stylized as SiliconGraphics before 1999, later rebranded SGI, historically known as Silicon Graphics Computer Systems or SGCS) was an American high-performance computing manufacturer, producing computer hardware and soft ...
workstation
A workstation is a special computer designed for technical or computational science, scientific applications. Intended primarily to be used by a single user, they are commonly connected to a local area network and run multi-user operating syste ...
s. The main features were paint, compositing, image manipulation and special effects.
History
Illusion was originally developed by Parallax Software under the name "Advance". Avid later bought Parallax, and renamed "Advance" to "Media Illusion". The software was discontinued on December 6, 2001, officially due to lack of resources to support it any further.
Media Illusion was targeted at the high-end SGI post production market, which was at the time dominated by
Discreet Flame.
In 2001,
Softimage, a division of Avid, introduced a new image compositing module in its 3D animation product
Softimage XSI
Autodesk Softimage is a discontinued 3D computer graphics application, for producing 3D computer graphics, 3D modeling, and computer animation. Now owned by Autodesk and formerly titled Softimage XSI (stylized as Softimage, XSI), the software has ...
2.0 which is based on Media Illusion 6.0. The product offers and augments many of the essential image compositing features of Media Illusion on Windows and Linux, but does not offer the video digitizing and playback support, and the
OMFI media integration and editing which helped Media Illusion make its place in high end broadcast. The compositing module integrated in XSI 6.0 (2000 USD) targets RGBA file-based desktop compositing for the 3D artist.
Features
Media Illusion featured distributed rendering using multiple CPUs. Several specialized plug-ins were available from Sapphire, The Foundry, Primatte and Ultimatte, among others.
Development
Release history
See also
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Avid Elastic Reality
Elastic Reality was a warping and morphing software application available on Windows, Macintosh, and Silicon Graphics workstations and was discontinued in 1999.
Features
The workflow of the application is based around drawing source and destinati ...
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Avid Matador
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Softimage XSI
Autodesk Softimage is a discontinued 3D computer graphics application, for producing 3D computer graphics, 3D modeling, and computer animation. Now owned by Autodesk and formerly titled Softimage XSI (stylized as Softimage, XSI), the software has ...
*
Avid Technology
Avid Technology, Inc. is a global technology company headquartered in Burlington, Massachusetts, and was founded in August 1987 by Bill Warner. It develops software, SaaS, and hardware products used in media and entertainment.
History
Avid wa ...
References
IRIX software
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