Spatial Creative has added an alpha tool to STAGEit Optimiser, its free Mac app, that turns ordinary video into an animated Gaussian splat sequence.
STAGEit Optimiser began as the studio's internal development tool, and the update announced on October 6 generates its splats with Apple's SHARP model. SHARP predicts a 3D scene from a single image, so the Optimiser processes each video frame, optimizes the results and packages them into one sequence. SHARP is not bundled with the app and downloads separately when the feature is used if it is not already installed.
Spatial Creative recommends source clips of about 10 seconds or less, which can be trimmed and cropped inside the Optimiser. People Cutout isolates a person from the background, and an optional Depth Cleanup pass removes disconnected splats and material behind the subject. A depth control sets how much of the scene SHARP reconstructs, and the studio's own tests used 0.3 m for an apple, 0.8 m for a golden retriever and 1.0 m for a person.
A full sequence takes 30 to 60 minutes to process, so Spatial Creative suggests a 5 fps test pass to check the crop, isolation and depth first. The Optimiser supports up to 30 fps, and the studio recommends 24 fps for final sequences. The alpha targets subjects about 2 meters from the camera and outputs a sequence about 1 meter in real world scale, and Spatial Creative states it is not intended for scanning rooms, buildings or large environments.
STAGEit Optimiser writes a .splatseq file, an archive of the individual splat frames that can be renamed to .zip and extracted for other tools. Spatial Creative does not state the format of the frames in the archive or give a version number for the update. Sequence playback currently runs in STAGEit, and the same release adds wireless transfer, sending optimized USDZ files or splat sequences over the local network into a STAGEit scene on Apple Vision Pro.
STAGEit Optimiser runs only on Apple Silicon Macs and needs a separate Blender installation. It is available now as a free download.
