The program “Claxa” is intended for tracking an object in a video footage, constructing the mask of the object, and subsequent extraction of the object. Tracking an object with the aim to extract it means precise detection of its boundaries on a pixel level. In this relation “Claxa” admits much more alive and natural movements of the mask, even more believable than manual construction of the mask using Bezier-spline in Adobe After Effects (AE), because the mask receives many more degrees of freedom, and it can reproduce the finest movements of the object, which are beyond the reach of human operator.
Except binary masks, where each pixel is unambiguously attributed to the object or to background, “Claxa” can build smooth raster masks with soft transition from background to foreground. By the description this feature resembles well known “feather” from many graphics packages, but in “Claxa” smoothing of the boundaries depends not only on geometrical distance from the center of the object-background transition, but also on real spread of the boundary in the given place of the current frame.
“Claxa” offers several options for masks built in it to be subsequently processed in AE. Here are the export types:
Technically the tracking in “Claxa” is performed by comparison of the frame, where a user has drawn static mask for reference, with the rest frames of some part of the footage on the base of colors coincidence and evenness of boundaries transformation. Automatic tracking can not always be satisfactory and in some cases it is even impossible. To give an example it can be when a 3D object is rotating and some new part of it is appearing on the screen, and the part is not similar by color on the rest of the object seen in previous frames.
But even in the most troublesome cases automatic computation of the mask works well at least in some vicinity of the frame with reference mask. In that cases it is possible to introduce additional reference frames, associate with each of them some region in the footage, where it will be used to produce automatic masks. If the regions of two reference masks overlap, then the program takes care about gradual change of smooth masks obtained from the different reference masks.
Claxa installer (2.4 Mb)
Guide in Russian (0.4 Mb)
Guide in English (0.4 Mb)
The following archives include projects that can be opened in Claxa. Although for the sake of decreasing their sizes you need to perform tracking by executing "Segment|Process All" just after opening to see the results.
Foreman (3.5 Mb) This footage is used in the tutorials from the User's Guide.
Leader (2.1 Mb)
Mail to claxa (at) patchmaker.net