Mistika is a powerful reality in VR

With Virtual Reality being touted as the next frontier of post-production innovation, SGO is prepared with solutions for the challenges it presents to the industry, offering Mistika as a revolutionary product for any company that wants to lead the way in VR.

SGO has unveiled a preview of Mistika’s advanced Immersive Reality Toolset, combining award-winning stereo 3D functionality with a new VR mode. This new toolset is designed for anyone serious about finishing 360 video and VR. Mistika provides powerful tools for colour, HDR, stereo 3D, high frame rate and compositing for Virtual Reality, in one complete system. These advances enable SGO to equip customers with a highly capable VR post toolset, allowing them to create extraordinary VR content.

Mistika’s toolset provides a dedicated finishing environment that can easily be applied to VR projects, as well as automatically handling projection mapping of Equi-Rectangular content to a new 360º image-processing and finishing engine. Mistika handles the complex relationships between the spherical world and the flattened source and delivery files, so the user can work in the same way they always have, without dramatic changes to their method, and without the technical headaches of VR delivery. Shapes texts and composites are being designed to automatically warp and track across spherical projection seams and poles. The operator can switch between normal space and Virtual Reality space, by controlling the spherical VR viewing port with a grading panel tracking-ball, a newly developed GUI control or with a VR device gyroscope.

Miguel Angel Doncel, CEO of SGO said, “This functionality is unique, and is not a 2D system merely pretending to do VR. In order to implement this feature, we take full advantage of Mistika’s existing real-time architecture and advanced image-processing engine, integrating finishing and grading capabilities in a powerful Virtual Reality workflow. This simply wouldn’t be possible in a ‘colour grading only’ system.”

SGO has optimised VR device connections. Mistika will enable users to connect live video output to VR devices for the final result to be viewed in real-time, not just in the visual-editor mode, but in the actual immersive reality experience itself.

The company recognises the importance of working with its customers through the evolution of VR, and is rewarding those who already have the Mistika stereoscopic 3D option, by giving them access to the ‘Immersive Reality Toolset’ free of charge – this incorporates a new VR mode alongside the existing stereo 3D functionality.

“Having a system like Mistika and a team like SGO is really what you need for working with a new technology like VR,” said Ben Rosenblatt, executive producer, Bad Robot Productions in Los Angeles.