Peasant Village, Visual effects in live action
Peasant Village - Change of plans
After working with our filmed material for a while now, we are starting to doubt if it is of the quality we are looking for. The issue is mostly technical. The camera we have used just ain’t good enough.
A few of the problems we have had with it is:
- CMOS-censor gives distorted images when moving camera too fast
- Image stabilizer also distorts the footage
- Noise
- Chromatic abberation
- Focus problems
These problems made the tracking of the video almost impossible. The distortion in the footage made it really hard to get a correct camera solve.
The solution for this is to somehow find a new, better camera. So today we contacted “Film i Västerbotten” (resource center for film and video in Västerbotten) to see if they could provide us with a professional video camera. To initiate this process, we had to write an application and send it by snailmail, which we have done this afternoon. It’ll be in the mailbox by tomorrow morning and hopefully we get an answer pretty soon. We might have to change our schedule a little, but we still have a lot of CG elements to work with during the waiting for their reply.
Christoffer and Martin
- Hello
This projects sounds interesting.
Sorry to hear about the footage. What software are you using to track? If you are using some automatic tracker like pftrack and boujou it might be worth trying out 3dequalizer and do it by hand. It takes a while to get to know all the tricks to get the best solve. But it's a really good tracker. Worked with it for 3 months, more reliable than a automatic tracker.
Posted by Olle Rydberg on 01/28 at 07:31 PM
- Hey Olle! Thanks for your comment! Yeah we've been working with Boujou and Syntheyes. We tried adding up to 40 manual feature tracks to help the solve on it's way, but still it doesn't solve correctly. The distortion in the image is crazy, you should see when we go frame by frame how one frame is good, then the next is completely skewed in comparison... I might post a GIF anim later, hehe. Anyways, I'll give 3dequalizer a look! Please keep the comments and the constructive criticism coming! :)
Posted by Christoffer Lindvall on 01/28 at 07:59 PM
- Found this on youtube...
CMOS vs CCD...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UEaDrS-yzIE
Hopefully we'll get to borrow a Canon XH A1 camera from "Film i Västerbotten"... Fingers crossed!
Posted by Christoffer Lindvall on 01/29 at 01:06 AM
- Do you have any de-lensing in your pipeline?
Since all the cg element wont have any distortion (fisheye effect) it's best to undistort the plate, put the cg on top and then put the distortion back on everything again in comp.
To do this you have to film a lensgrid/checker on set and then use a software to figure out how much distortion there is. You can then later use these values to bring the distortion back in comp.
Posted by Olle Rydberg on 01/30 at 04:17 PM
- Yes we will do the de-lensing. We will be doing it in Nuke(Nuke 6 has a new lens distortion node which seem to be very good), instead of doing it in the tracking software. That way we don't have to pipe it through the tracking software to redistort the cg, which will double the disk space usage.
Keep on with the comments, we like them :)
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 01/31 at 04:25 AM
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