DEFINITION May 2019

SET- UP | I NTERV I EW

It’s a through- the-lens monocular tracking solution, 100% software based

ABOVE Arraiy’s DeepTrack in progress

DEFINITION: Is your background based in development? MARK TOBIN: I’ve worked in post- production creative services for

30 years. I started as an editor on Avid in New York in 1989. I then worked for companies like PBS and HBO, before moving to LA 20 years ago where I started producing with a little company called Method Studios, which is now owned by Deluxe. Then, I went to run a company called A52, which is part of the Rock Paper Scissors group of companies. I then opened up the MPC office in North America and ran Psyop, an animation company in commercial advertising. DEF: So your next step was Arraiy? What did you bring to the company? MT: I was asking myself ‘what am I going to do next?’. I felt like real-time content was really a growing area and how’s that going to be enabled and is AI going to help? Is it going to stretch me intellectually and allow me to be in the space that I’ve been in with the same relationships? I looked around and got introduced to Arraiy through a mutual friend, but when I found them they were a hardware company that had a three camera rig attached to a hero camera. It was focussed on providing visual effects elements to the MPCs and Framestores of the world, rotoscoping and tracking and the like. I gently said to them that this probably was not going to work. You’re going to have to get that rig on to cameras and, ultimately, you’re going to have a DOP who will say that he or she doesn’t want it on their camera. How are you then going to manage all that data and get it to all those places?

At NAB Show 2019, we interviewed Mark Tobin, new CEO of Arraiy, a Silicon Valley start-up company that is looking to revolutionise virtual capture for movies – and that’s just the start ARRAIY FOR HOLLYWOOD CAMERA TRACKING

QUESTIONS JULI AN M ITCHELL

10 DEF I N I T ION | MAY 20 1 9

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