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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

EPIC-X UPDATE

Jay A. Kelley said:
Coming from me, this may not mean as much, but I remember David Mullen also commenting on this one time. To me, a top flight focus puller is an artist.. Nothing less. They watch the rehearsals intently, and look for not where to focus, but WHEN to focus. There are OVS two shots that are made or broken by the right focus pulling.. Actors bring a little something different to each take (The good ones) and you may rack on the reaction, but then on another take your forground speaker may slowly turn his head towards the co-star because they feel like giving the scene to them for the reaction, so the AC will pull with the speed of the turn of the head.

I have seen idiot pullers try this and ruin a take, but the masters.. they bring a whole new level to the scene.

No... These guys are artists.. They may have technical skill, but they are artists, and I am in no rush to see them replaced in any way.

Now if you are talking about ONE TYPE of focus pulling, I.E. Tracking Actor from point A to point B.. Then yeah, electronic is fine with me.. But only then.

Jay
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hard to disagree with that jay, good points. any kind of creative work like that is best done by artists, but technology can help us on some of the more physically limiting and challenging situations where it is either impractical or impossible for an AC to be pulling, or darn near impossible to hold the focus on a subject. indeed, there's some crazy shots that get cooked up out there... hopefully technology will help us make those even crazier ;)

on another note, it is a lot of fun to get in a groove with your camera assistants, working as one. i hope my electronic AC's at least make some jokes or something...
 
Jay A. Kelley said:
Coming from me, this may not mean as much, but I remember David Mullen also commenting on this one time. To me, a top flight focus puller is an artist.. Nothing less. They watch the rehearsals intently, and look for not where to focus, but WHEN to focus. There are OVS two shots that are made or broken by the right focus pulling.. Actors bring a little something different to each take (The good ones) and you may rack on the reaction, but then on another take your forground speaker may slowly turn his head towards the co-star because they feel like giving the scene to them for the reaction, so the AC will pull with the speed of the turn of the head.

I have seen idiot pullers try this and ruin a take, but the masters.. they bring a whole new level to the scene.

No... These guys are artists.. They may have technical skill, but they are artists, and I am in no rush to see them replaced in any way.

Now if you are talking about ONE TYPE of focus pulling, I.E. Tracking Actor from point A to point B.. Then yeah, electronic is fine with me.. But only then.

Jay
Click to expand...

I agree 100%.

There would be countless scenarios where such a wireless AF tracking device would be extremely useful. Perhaps not in very intimate close up scenes, but just imagine the possibilities of assigning multiple channels (A, B, C etc.) and being to swap between them in real-time in an action scene. If you're doing a run and gun shot in the middle of a WWII scene with a bunch of different actors who are dispersed all around the place, it would simplify shooting a lot. Not to mention something like two guys chasing each other through a crowded downtown scene, or a car chase. You could theoretically mount it to anything that moves (if the size allows it of course).

But in all seriousness I submitted a very detailed mockup of such a solution to RED's R&D/Idea Submission department in March. Hopefully their not too busy with other awesome stuff and can tell us if they think it'll work! :-)

Please Jarred, if you can find the time I'd really appreciate it! :-)
 
Regardless if focus pulling is an art... turning a little wheel seems like a technique that has some room for improvement.

It wouldn't be terribly difficult today to strap a Kinect to the top of an Epic, get a live near perfect 3D track of the head and then just have a touchscreen with a generic Body on it. You wouldn't even have to track the eyes in frame, you could just hold your finger on their eyes and the 3D live scan of the scene would do the necessary math from the 3D location of the eyes to the 3D location of sensor.

Focus would be 'directed' not controlled. You still might have a wheel or wheel equivalent for organic racks between tracked points but again that would be to enable the focus puller to concentrate on directing focus instead of the technical challenges of anticipation. Anything in my opinion that gets the technical obstacles out of an artists way the better. Ironically most of the time what removes technical obstacles is more technology. ;)
 
Gavin Greenwalt said:
Regardless if focus pulling is an art... turning a little wheel seems like a technique that has some room for improvement.

It wouldn't be terribly difficult today to strap a Kinect to the top of an Epic, get a live near perfect 3D track of the head and then just have a touchscreen with a generic Body on it. You wouldn't even have to track the eyes in frame, you could just hold your finger on their eyes and the 3D live scan of the scene would do the necessary math from the 3D location of the eyes to the 3D location of sensor.

Focus would be 'directed' not controlled. You still might have a wheel or wheel equivalent for organic racks between tracked points but again that would be to enable the focus puller to concentrate on directing focus instead of the technical challenges of anticipation. Anything in my opinion that gets the technical obstacles out of an artists way the better. Ironically most of the time what removes technical obstacles is more technology. ;)
Click to expand...

I cannot be sure Gavin, but something tells me that if it were anywhere near as easy and effective and you think, then would be done.. A lot. In fact I think what you are speaking of is EXTREMELY difficult, and VERY expensive. There is so much nuance involved.. It will be hard to replicate.

Just an opinion. RED would know more than I.. Perhaps Jarred.

Jay
 
i agree with gavin. the technology is most certainly there... waiting. it really just hasn't been introduced in a package yet. i'm not saying it's altogether easy to do this, but it's certainly not altogether difficult even with cheap, readily available consumer electronics. the more i think about it, the more surprised i am that there isn't anything floating around already. or maybe there is...
 
Gavin Greenwalt said:
It wouldn't be terribly difficult today to strap a Kinect to the top of an Epic, get a live near perfect 3D track of the head and then just have a touchscreen with a generic Body on it. You wouldn't even have to track the eyes in frame, you could just hold your finger on their eyes and the 3D live scan of the scene would do the necessary math from the 3D location of the eyes to the 3D location of sensor.
Click to expand...

Nice!

Too bad they aren't higher res. If you had more resolution you could also use the Kinect's depth map to pull keys without using a greenscreen.
 
Gavin Greenwalt said:
Regardless if focus pulling is an art... turning a little wheel seems like a technique that has some room for improvement.

It wouldn't be terribly difficult today to strap a Kinect to the top of an Epic, get a live near perfect 3D track of the head and then just have a touchscreen with a generic Body on it. You wouldn't even have to track the eyes in frame, you could just hold your finger on their eyes and the 3D live scan of the scene would do the necessary math from the 3D location of the eyes to the 3D location of sensor.

Focus would be 'directed' not controlled. You still might have a wheel or wheel equivalent for organic racks between tracked points but again that would be to enable the focus puller to concentrate on directing focus instead of the technical challenges of anticipation. Anything in my opinion that gets the technical obstacles out of an artists way the better. Ironically most of the time what removes technical obstacles is more technology. ;)
Click to expand...

You need a computer bigger than an Epic just for this task.

From time to time you'll hear that "computer vision is a solved problem" but being computer scientists, they actually mean with monster workstations in the lab under test, not real world, conditions.

Computers still have a very hard time separating objects from one another in real world 2D images ... and its processor intensive to fuse to 2D images into 3D and then deriving geometry from that ... its pretty easy for a Mac Pro, but exactly how are you going to mount that to your camera rig?

Turning a little wheel is actually a very elegant solution. I think that Red and Apple's touch to focus is a big step ... and the RedMote Pro will make decoupling the little wheel from the camera rig rather permanent in a few short years I think.

We need a few more turns around the block for Moore's law to give us the compute power a concept like yours requires. Its not "impossible" but it will be a LOT cheaper to wait until we can use the processor designed for the iPad 5 to do the job.
 
small consumer cameras already have built in, realtime 2d focus tracking... i really don't think gavin's suggestion is that far off, though i don't think either of us are suggesting that the epic would be doing that processing. you would probably "tether" it (wirelessly, we would hope) to a laptop, ipad, or custom device which would also serve as the control surface.
 
Curran Giddens said:
Nice!

Too bad they aren't higher res. If you had more resolution you could also use the Kinect's depth map to pull keys without using a greenscreen.
Click to expand...

Actually this is a great idea ... but instead of a kinect the "right" sensor for this task is another camera. You know ... a standard 3D rig.

The next step is not to merely sync images for stereoscopic imaging, but to actually generate some geometry from the data.

Then just throw away pixels with a distance greater than X, etc. etc.

I'm a little giddy thinking of the second or third generation of this software.

Anyone from The Foundry reading this? We should talk ... I just want a lifetime license with maintenance for Nuke in exchange.
 
paulherrin said:
small consumer cameras already have built in, realtime 2d focus tracking... i really don't think gavin's suggestion is that far off, though i don't think either of us are suggesting that the epic would be doing that processing. you would probably "tether" it (wirelessly, we would hope) to a laptop, ipad, or custom device which would also serve as the control surface.
Click to expand...

I didn't explain enough.

Before I go on, if you are happy with the results of the 2D focus tracking in digital point and shoots ... well why bother with the rest?

Back to the "real" problem.

The computer not only has to know how far away something is, but it has to identify it too. It has to know that its looking at an eye or whatever ... which means it has to know how to tell eyes from almonds, marbles and the back of a dollar bill. You have to be able to determine which eye you are tracking ... it wouldn't do to suddenly swap from tracking the left eye to the right eye ... of a different actor or the horse they are riding.

Its a bigger problem than you may guess at first blush. Its a Mac Pro problem not an iPad problem. For now.

Actually ... a Mac Pro can't handle the problem in realtime yet. Just do a track in Resolve, even a well configured Resolve machine won't always track in 2D in realtime! And it won't always track properly either.

Its a big problem.
 
Jay A. Kelley said:
I cannot be sure Gavin, but something tells me that if it were anywhere near as easy and effective and you think, then would be done.. A lot.

Jay
Click to expand...

You would be amazed at the number of tasks that aren't "terribly difficult" that aren't being done... a lot.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYsqNnDA1l4&feature=related

Reliability is still the largest issue.

Curran said:
Too bad they aren't higher res. If you had more resolution you could also use the Kinect's depth map to pull keys without using a greenscreen.
Click to expand...

Not to get too far off topic--but... depth maps are actually really bad for extracting keys. Getting a holdout garbage matte is already comparatively really easy and reliable. The really hard stuff isn't just resolution it's semi-transparency per-pixel information. Getting the motion blur right is 10x more trouble than getting a hard matte. Depth maps 1) aren't pixel aligned since they're a separate sensor and you can't get pixel accuracy let alone the sub-pixel accuracy of a chroma key 2) don't handle semi-transparency or motion blur since you only have a depth not an opacity.
 
Stephen Pruitt said:
What I think is being forgotten here is that the vast majority of us aren't working on big budget films with A-list "hit their marks every time" talent.
Stephen
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Who on earth are they!

I remember talking to a 1st about, name omitted due to fear, and asked how he was at hitting marks "hit his marks! you're lucky if he's in the same F'ing room!" was the reply.

Oh and as for the sensor behind the ear, oh yes, that'll really help continue the plague of focus just behind the eyes...

It really bothers me how many people here have no understanding of what people in the business do, I'll fight to get the right 1st on a job, they van make or break you. It's not mechanical, it's a performance, timing is everything.
 
train.jpg


As interesting as Focus Pulling discussions are (Cinematography thread?) any chance we can get back to the very exciting topic of this thread?

EPIC X IS SHIPPING IN A FEW DAYS! I still don't understand all the top mount bottom mount options.

Can some M owners chime in (start a thread) called "Epic Configurations" and post their rigs?
 
Tim Whitcomb said:
train.jpg


As interesting as Focus Pulling discussions are (Cinematography thread?) any chance we can get back to the very exciting topic of this thread?

EPIC X IS SHIPPING IN A FEW DAYS! I still don't understand all the top mount bottom mount options.

Can some M owners chime in (start a thread) called "Epic Configurations" and post their rigs?
Click to expand...

Thank You I Agree!!!!!
 
Too funny, Geoff!

BUT, I'm guessing that any system that is smart enough to tell the camera to "focus here" can also be programmed to tell the camera "focus here, except two inches closer."

:-)

Stephen
 
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