Matador (meaning killer in Spanish) was a paint application targeted at the television and film production markets. Running on Silicon Graphicsworkstations, its main features were paint, mask creation/rotoscoping, animation, and image stabilization/tracking.[1]
Matador was originally developed by Gareth Griffith, Chris Steele, Dominic Jackson and Andrew Ballingall of Parallax Software in the UK beginning in 1989.[2] Adopted by production studios and visual effects houses such as Industrial Light & Magic, Digital Domain, Sony Pictures and many others, Matador was used on hundreds of feature films throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, including Jurassic Park, Forrest Gump, and The Mask. In 1995, Parallax Software was acquired by Avid Technology, which continued to market Matador into the early 2000s, eventually incorporating its functionality into Softimage and Media Illusion.
Feature List
Matador 7.55 running on a Silicon Graphics computer
Paint: Resolution-independent 2D paint system supporting 64-bit color depth. Customizeable pressure-sensitive brushes, cloning, image filters, layers, vector shapes, color correction, 2D and 3D text, and macros.[3]
Masking/Rotoscoping: Chromakey masking via luminance/chroma/component/hue, multi-layered rotoscoping with animatable rotosplines and automatic traveling mattes.
Animation: Keyframeable animation of all functions, hierarchical animation with unlimited layers and in-betweening, realtime linetest.
Stabilization/Tracking: Motion tracking using up to 256 reference points; image stabilization tools.
Release History
Version
Hardware
O/S
Release date
Price
Significant changes (selected)
Matador 7.0
?
IRIX
September 12, 1996
?
New painting tools
Enhanced handling of shapes and text
Support for additional file formats
Unlimited paint layers within the animation module
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