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**joconnell** · 13-12-2016, 05:51 AM

Biggest things are a fisheye and a nodal head. Get a nodal ninja 3 and samyang and peleng both do really good fisheyes for about €250. You don't need a fisheye but it'll cut down on the amount of angles you'd need to shoot from and speed is very handy if you're on set (In that regard, a ricoh theta isn't as good quality but it's 60 seconds to shoot the full thing).

For the chart, if I'd to do it again I'd get a kodak q13 chart. http://www.kodak.com/motion/products...es/default.htm - If you get a macbeth chart, you'll likely have a hard time trying to match all of the colour patches on it and what's more important is the brightness values - the q13 or larger q14 chart has both colour patches and a 20 step grey scale chart. What you'd do is shoot off a few shots of the chart on your camera and after you'd white balance the images from a mid grey, you can see if your camera stays neutral as it goes towards the darker and lighter patches. This is one way of getting some colour accuracy and also trying to keep your data linear.

Balls - the grey one is any ball you want painted with grey paint - you go to a paint store and get a sample from the mid grey on your q13 chart and then paint the ball with a few coats of that. The idea of the grey ball isn't to be a precise measurement value (it'd be great if it was) but when you get it on set, you'll be able to tell the direction and softness of light from each direction and since the ball is a neutral grey, it'll get tinted by the colour of each of the light sources so you'll be able to recreate the ratio and hue of all the light sources in the scene. With the chrome ball, it's useful for positioning lights in your scene (the place highlight tool rules!) and seeing is your hdri aligned / rotated correctly - you place a chrome ball in 3d over background footage of your chrome ball and use it to position your lights in the correct place in your scene by seeing if the reflection of your light is in the same spot as the reflection of the real light on the real chrome ball. You can't get a 100% reflective ball so I'd rely more on the grey ball as a guide to colour and relative brightness of lights. Size is down to how far you are from camera.

Also put magic lantern on your camera so you get the auto bracketing features

So in order of santa list:

If you need speed on set:
Ricoh theta and tripod

If you need quality:
- Nodal head (you're fucked for trying to stitch your panoramas otherwise)
- q13 chart (colour ref and also grey swatch for making a grey ball)
- Luxmeter since it's cheap
- fisheye lens - far more convenient since you'll shoot less. I have a 600d and a samyang and get 12k panoramas from it.
- Grey ball, home made
- Silver ball - garden ornament (some people combine grey and silver by painting one half of the silver)
- ND filter gel sheet - if you're trying to shoot clear skies with sun your camera won't be able to shoot quick enough to underexpose the sun so most people get a sheet of ND gel, cut out a small square of it and tape it to the back lens of the fish eye - you can't get filters for the front of most fisheyes since they'd be in shot so you can just stick a gel on the back!

**Ihno** · 13-12-2016, 03:22 PM

Thanks alot John!

I thought the linearization would be an automatic prozess, hard to imagine how hard it will be to match all the colors and grey values. Grey values only could be possible though.

The ball thing is funny. I think I saw them first in a making of of JP2, or was it LOTR1? Don't know but they've been around for a while and most people actually make them there self?
Could be an market niche, selling physical Material balls with scanned shaders.

I have to try the Ricoh theta, our video guy has one. But its the first version I think and he told me the quality is very, very bad.

Since my buget is not that big and I originally planned to buy a new wacom it's gonna be a tough decision.

The Panosaurus head is pretty cheap and seem to be good after reading a few comments and reviews. Any experiences with other than Nodal?

Thanks for the tip with magic lantern! I already though I'd need to get some kind of programmable remote for the camera.

**cheerioboy** · 13-12-2016, 03:52 PM

You think for an HDRI capture option you could get away with using a Theta S and this software, http://www.builtlight.org/simple-hdr/? I hate the time sink in capturing such a huge image set, stitching, and all that for something that gets used mostly for reflections... since you mention placing actual lights to assist.

The Theta doesn't capture raw images so that might hurt it - the ease of use looks appealing.

**Ihno** · 14-12-2016, 04:39 AM

If I get a Theta S to shoot the domes. A luxmeter to mesure the brightness. And a chart for linealize the dome and some reference pics which I shoot with my dslr at the set (For material creation). Plus a grey and a mirror ball. Would that be a good starting point?
And in chase of Material creation, wouldn't the colors actually be more important than the brightness assuming we're talking about a slight difference?

Has anyone a comparison of the same Backgound shot with the Theta and a dslr. Courious how much the results would differ..

If I get the Kodac thing and use the grey scale to linearize wouldn't I linealize the lightcolor than? Turning a warm sun light into white for instance.

**Vizioen** · 14-12-2016, 05:18 AM

Well if you have a few 1000s of $ to spare (+- 18000) you can always go for a spheron VR: https://www.spheron.com/products/cgi...alization.html

**joconnell** · 14-12-2016, 06:10 AM

Yeah the theta will shoot bracketed jpgs with an app - I think being able to shoot raw means you can shoot less brackets but will end up with a similar end result. The theta isn't huge res but again if you're on a film shoot you've no time and your 1st ad will appreciate you only taking 60 seconds. It was really interesting to hear that even ILM on the avengers were having hassle getting on to set to get their data!

**kagemaru** · 14-12-2016, 06:11 AM

Very good suggestions here, i second them all.
If you are looking to buy gray/chrome sphere instead of building them yourself, have a look at AKROMATIC's.
We bought from them for a good price i think but i looked now and prices went up, a lot. I've to say though that quality is very good and we're very happy with them.

**kosso_olli** · 14-12-2016, 09:06 AM

Originally posted by Vizioen View Post

Well if you have a few 1000s of $ to spare (+- 18000) you can always go for a spheron VR: https://www.spheron.com/products/cgi...alization.html

Spheron is producing cameras with technology from the last century. It can be slow as hell to capture under difficult lighting conditions.
I would recommend the Civetta from Weiss AG or the Lizard Q if you need even more resolution.

**Ihno** · 15-12-2016, 04:46 AM

The theta seems to be the winner for me (assuming I'd have to rob a bank for the last two suggestions)
So the list would be:
Theta S
Kodac q13 chart
ND gel
Luxmeter
Homemade balls

How would the linearlizing go? Linealizing the brackets first or linealize the HDRI? And I'm not shure how to read the information about the colors they provide "(20 steps in 0.10 density increments between0.0 [white] and a practical printing black of 1.90 density)" what does that mean in float numbers? Do you guys know good tutorials about the process?

Edit:

Originally posted by joconnell View Post

What you'd do is shoot off a few shots of the chart on your camera and after you'd white balance the images from a mid grey, you can see if your camera stays neutral as it goes towards the darker and lighter patches. This is one way of getting some colour accuracy and also trying to keep your data linear.

So if I understand you correctly I'd shoot a image or take one of the brackets, propably the one in the middle and linealize this. And afterwards put the color corection I made onto the HDRI?

**joconnell** · 15-12-2016, 05:12 AM

No need for the nd gel with the theta, I don't think there's a way to mount it on the lens and you definitely can't get in behind the lens before the sensor.

In terms of linearizing it kind of depends what software you have access to. What you'd do is get the rgb values of each patch and then in lightroom set the middle grey to be the same as it's rgb value, then adjust the shadow and highlight values using the curves to set the other patches as closely as possible making sure that no colour cast is getting into the grey values. You can save this as a colour preset and run all your images through it. There's a good guide here - http://www.rawdigger.com/howtouse/ov...ments-settings and a video on vimeo using a colour checker which is a similar process - https://vimeo.com/107961975 . The colour checker passport comes with software that'll attempt to profile your camera from a shot of the colour checker but I didn't find it that accurate.

**Ihno** · 15-12-2016, 07:59 AM

Great! Thanks for clearing that up! And thanks for the tutorials.
Sorry for my ignorance.

**cheerioboy** · 18-12-2016, 08:08 AM

I nabbed a Theta S off ebay and did a test HDRI using this app, http://www.builtlight.org/simple-hdr/
Seemed to work ok... http://i.imgur.com/Pw3KAAn.jpg

Although my grey balls don't seem to match - could be something wrong with the paint I picked. I can package up more assets from this image if anyone wants it. The original bracketed images, etc.

I did the processing in Nuke, with J_MergeHDR to merge the images and mmColorTarget to correct the colors from the colorchecker chart.

It might have helped to also have taken some reference images with my Canon DSLR to get camera settings and try and work out the proper light levels to match those settings.

**Ihno** · 19-12-2016, 12:58 AM

Thakns for posting this Brendan. I'd be pretty interested to take a look at the hdri and the scene maby, want to play with it a little. (And find out which amp you have there)

The quailty dosn't seem to be too bad. Enough for manny cases at least.

I'm still unshure. The Theta SC seems to be Identical for photo.
But there is no bracketing app especially for that cam. The developer of this app:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/d...apps.thetashdr
Says he dosn't support the sc and he didn't testet the app with the sc but: "some use the app with the sc"
I think I might still buy the S because of this. Even if it works now... Who knows what happens after some updates.

**Ihno** · 09-02-2018, 04:27 AM

Digging this up again.

The ThetaS worked quite well for what I was doing.

Anyone tryed https://matterport.com/de/?

Their scanner costs only ~4k which is quite cheap for a 360degree 3D scanner I think.
I'd be very interested in getting a set of data from it in hands.
To judge the quality.
We'll rent one soon though.

Edit: I found examples of the data:
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/3mmaainvv...hYyJsNsra?dl=0
Its not very good. But might still help. Don't quite know if its worth the money though.

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