Note: still in development!

There are two variants of this technique, both extremely useful in creating the special effects shot.

Real Camera in a Pure 3D CGI Scene

This technique was developed, to our knowledge, by one of the best VFX teams of the world, which was used in Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings(tm) - they used in for the battle scene in Moria and it added superb realism to that scene.

The goal is to record realistic camera movement including all the shaking caused by a person handling a real live camera and applying this to the virtual camera object in the CG scene, most shots are handled by ordinary cameras anyway so the few CG scenes should have the same effect. It is desirable to keep the feel of the camera movement style consistent over all the shots, so we record real camera behavior for these CG shots.

Because the scene may be in motion, the camera should be as well (e.g. you might be looking at the scene from a moving car or the cameraman has to walk in a crowd moving out of the way of others), you need live motion capture processing that influences the virtual camera in real time.

The cameraman holds a box with markers fastened to it acting as though it is a camera. Its position is evaluated and used to set the position of the virtual 3D camera in MotionBuilder, the scene is displayed to the cameraman with very low latency through an LCD viewfinder. It makes it look like the shot is recorded rather than generated, when you move the camera (pan, roll...), the virtual scene truly changes according to the action you just did!

As with any motion capture, the results are far quite realistic, especially when the client wants a shot that looks and feels like it is taken by live camera. Attempting to keyframe such a move will end up adding camera noise and various simulated rotations, which could be recorded here in no time.
In order to achieve realistic results, the pipeline below is used:

• Create a CG scene in which we animate the objects; e.g. moving cars, CG characters etc. If the file is too large, a PC will not be able to display the scene in real time. (you can use a simplified version of the scene for the recording)
• Create a 3D virtual camera object
• Convert the file to FBX format (MotionBuilder)
• In the MoCap setup, we project the output of MotionBuilder view port that displays the rendered animation in real-time to a large display or video projection so that the actor moving in on the MoCap stage could see it properly.
• we link a virtual 3D camera in MotionBuilder to a fake camera with MoCap markers on it (essentially any object with few markers attached would be fine). In real-time, any movement made by the fake camera  causes immediate updates to the virtual 3D camera and re-renders the scene projected.

And our specialties -

• We support full camera positioning and rotation changes
• We can also limit moves to your needs, e.g. block camera roll
• Zoom is also an option! You tell us what the minimum  and maximum angle of your camera lens is and we can adjust it in real time.
• We can set stabilization to your camera simulating, common picture stabilization preventing camera shaking (rotation stabilization), or steadycam position stabilization (smooth position changes) - all this in real time during recording!
• We can record audio
• We can synchronize everything together for you with precision.

Motion Controlled Camera for CGI Shots

In this case, we can attach markers to your real camera. You can build a bluescreen in our studio, light the scene properly and record a normal bluescreen shot. During that, we also record the motion of the camera; this enables us to assemble the CGI elements to the scene precisely without a need to use (expensive and not so extremely precise) image 3D camera trackers such as Boujou or Matchmover to track the movement of the camera later. Then, the camera motion could be opened in 3D tools, where the CGI elements could be rendered and finally matched to the greenscreen shot exactly.

It is possible to sync everything exactly with 5x or even 10x motion data over-sampling (we can record at rates up to 250fps, 10x of the typical movie).