airport

[pg1]

Aint posted anything in ages, this is a lastpixel job that we did a few months back.
New building for fly in fly out miners in western australia

All max vray, syntheyes and AE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WTdmR...layer_embedded

[worldmode]

really nice. how long does it take you and how many people worked on this project?

[stevesideas]

Very nice. How long did it take to track all this footage so well ? Ive not had much success with tracking with PFpro. Is syntheyes a lot better ?

[pg1]

The tracking on this one was a nightmare.
There are no cheap mounts in perth at the moment as our old heli company closed up shop so it was an 12 minute shoulder cam from the city to the airport.
HD plate stabilized undistorted and tracked in syntheyes.I didnt track it but I think it was done in a day. In the end it was a bit of a hack. The track came loose in a number of spots so we time ramped through it. There was also some paint out in AE on the plate as the control tower in the video is 3D but the real tower kept popping into shot.
It was and unusual job for us in that we did still images first and then they came for an animation (usually its the other way round for us) Model was from the client. It required a lot of cleanup. Usual stuff thousands of materials, hundreds of thousands of objects etc.
The stills project, 4 images from the international terminal 4 aerial heli matched photos and 3 from the TWA building (main building in the animation) ran for about 4 weeks with lots of changes.
The animation was about 2 weeks with 4 people.

[joconnell]

Very nice. How long did it take to track all this footage so well ? Ive not had much success with tracking with PFpro. Is syntheyes a lot better ?

Heya Steve,

That shot doesn't look too back tracking wise but what I've always found is that it's down to the quality of the footage you get to start with, and manual tracking rather than the auto tracker. I use syntheyes for pretty much everything and it's generally solved all I've thrown at it - in a lot of cases down to the writer of the program, Russ Anderson, who's really helpful and the person on the end of every email you send to the place (one man company). An automatic tracker in most cases looks for high contrast details in the footage it can lock on to but it can't discern between good and bad - for example you could have a highlight on a shiny object that looks like a nice white dot on a dark surface and the tracker will immediately go for that, where as we as 3d folks would realise that the highlight isn't actually locked in position on the dark object, it slides over the surface since highlights and so on are view dependant. Likewise an auto tracker will follow details on moving objects since again it just sees a pattern it can follow cleanly.

If you use manual tracking, you get points in the places you want them which is really handy for locking in your 3d objects later on. The other big part of it is getting the points into the correct alignment so it's easy for you to place geometry afterwards. If you do auto tracking, it can save a lot of the donkey work of doing all the 2d tracks, you just need to know how to filter the tens or hundreds of tracks so that you're removing bad information that throws off the 3d solve.

On top of that you can also get bad footage depending on what camera it was shot on. One of the big problems with modern cameras is that they use a sensor that doesn't capture the entire frame in one go. They use a cmos sensor which records a bit like the scanline renderer - starts at the top and works its way down. The problem is that if you have a fast moving object, or if the camera moves in a quick fashion, the parts of the image towards the bottom of the frame are in a different place than the top so vertical lines skew all over the place! Here's an extreme example from the nikon d90 which to be fair was the first video slr nikon made - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kcycn...eature=related . You can remove a lot of the shutter lag using third party tools but again it makes tracking harder in a lot of cases. Do a quick test to see if the footage wobbles to see if it's useable. The skew mightn't be that bad so you can track it, it's more that if you try to render 3d you won't be able to replicate the skew so objects you're trying to lock in will float off the background they're supposed to be stuck to.

[stevesideas]

Thanks for the info guys. Very interesting. Im going to try the syntheyes demo now. I use a canon 5d mk2 to record my footage so I'll make sure its just simple slow pans and movement to stop the shutter roll.

Sorry if I hijacked the thread a bit...I'll shut up now

[joconnell]

If you use after effects or nuke, a company called the foundry made a filter called rolling shutter which removes a lot of this - I think imovie on the mac might have something built in too!

[pg1]

Not hijacked at all steve.
Syntheyes is great but got to warn ya steve its got one of the most awkward/ugly user interfaces out there.

joconnell, haven't used the foundry plug-in yet.Must look into it as I got a new 550d and want to shot some backplates with it in the next few weeks.I just finished reading your dof/motion blur blog entry, so if you want filmic motion blur do you typically set it to twice the frames per second?
Where are you based in Dublin?
Getting late over here on the arse of the world, off to bed.

[joconnell]

Yep that's it - a standard film camera uses a semicircular disc that rotates over the film to cut it off from light instead of a curtain shutter like a stills camera. The default film camera has the disc set to be half on / half off over the film or 180 degrees of the full 360 rotation so for each frame that goes through the camera, it's being exposed for half the time it's fed through the camera. To match this, you set your vray motion blur interval to be the same - half of whatever the length of a frame is, or 0.5 in this case. If you want a much higher strobe effect you'd change this to 0.25 in either vray or if you were using a film camera you'd use a 90 degree rotation. This means your frame is only visible for a quarter of the time it's being fed through the camera so you get less motion blur due to sampling a smaller portion of time. Saving private ryan used a 90 degree shutter angle for a lot of it's battle scenes, same with some of the bourne films too.

In your case with the 550d, I'd nearly always set your shutter speed to double the frame rate you're shooting at so if you're 25fps, double that and use a 1/50th shutter speed. What can happen a lot is that if you want to use really shallow focus with a 1/50th shutter speed, the lens will be letting in huge amounts of light and burning out your image if you're shooting outdoors. You can get a fader nd filter which you can adjust to cut down the light getting in to your camera and allow you to use whatever combination of f-stop and shutter you want.

And based about 20 minutes from Dublin city centre, working right in the middle of Dublin 2!

[stevesideas]

Thanks for the info. Yeah, I had heard about that plugin for rolling shutter. I used to have a Sony Ex-1 that suffered with the same problem. Sold it though due to lack of use.

What would you recommend other than syntheyes. Price wise it's pretty reasonable if it does solid tracking.

Im very keen to learn tracking and become good at it. Maybe I can call on your experience when the time comes...

[stevesideas]

The 5d only had 1/45 and 1/60 shutters speeds around that mark...

[joconnell]

I'd recommend a holiday, and a copy of syntheyes. To be honest I'd say most trackers can all operate in the same way - you do manual clean 2d tracks, then make a solve from that. I've always found syntheyes to be fairly priced, extremely fast and and perfect results wise. Add to that the support which is similar in generosity to the chaos group guys and I wouldn't bother with anything else. Only thing I can fault it on at the minute is that it doesn't respect frame ranges very well. If you've got a sequence of frames that starts from 500 to 1000 for example, syntheyes will always slide the clip so it starts at frame one. Pain in the next at the minute since all of my image sequences are starting at 1001. Otherwise it's fab. Here's a nasty track done in it - about 4300 frames at hd res on a steadicam, head tracking and camera tracking - http://www.vimeo.com/985470

[stevesideas]

Very cool video ! Nice one Im working through the syntheyes tutorials now with the evaluation.

[pg1]

Really nice, great work on the eyes and the lips.Nice tune too.
Good to see this standard of work coming out of Ireland.
I'm from Limerick myself but been over in Oz for the last 4 years.

Will try the shutter speed you recommended and will look into getting a fader nd filter.So do you usually set your vray cameras to 1/50th even for all cg shots just to get that feel or is it something that you would do in post?

I have been shooting at 60fps and shutter speed of 1/1000 and then putting it through twixtor and slowing down footage. Really quiet a nifty little plug-in. Good results in a short time.

[joconnell]

Yeah for 25fps work you'd follow the same rule and go 1/50th- I tend to use normal cameras a lot so 0.5 in the render dialog for me. There's some decent stuff being done over here but like yourself a lot of the really good folks leave for bigger challenges. There's a few nice gigs at the minute though, I'm doing a hbo series and another company has a Luc Besson feature that two friend of mine are directing. I must pick up a 550d for the same reasons as yourself!

Which coast are you based on? I've a load of mates that've worked around Sydney, they've good standards on the way they do things.