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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 :)

Movie Reshape

It's still not perfect- the baywatch clip gets a little buggy around the end...still, it's from a prerelease build.

This kind of stuff makes me realise that movies are just going to be shot in a "volume" in the future. Not the mocap stuff we associate with Cameron and Zemeckis necessarily but I can imagine placing a gopro sized plenoptic camera on each corner of a room to capture the actors and the set.

Camera movements, focus, cg augmentation will all be added easily in post thanks to software that'll interpret the images as voxel data.

I calculated a while ago that to have 4K output from a plenoptic lens like the one Adobe are developing it would take a camera with 2.3-ish times the pixels of the RED 617.

Like I said, I want that sensor/lens in a housing the size of a gopro.

hear that Jim? You can't retire just after you finish the Epic. We still need you :)
 
I see this having an impact on casting more than anything. If this technology matures then one day you may not be as limited in who you can cast for a certain role due to appearance only.
 
I highly doubt this technology will ever catch on in a significant way except as an FX tool. It'll always be too glitchy. The performance capture route is going to be practical and easy Looooongggg before this is except as a heavily guided fx shot.

Computers are cheap. People are expensive. It's orders of magnitude easier to just render a photo-realistic scene if you can manage to capture it than to extract people from a real scene change it and put it back in an unaltered state. We just need better scanners. By the time all the glitches are worked out from this tech they'll have necessarily in the process extracted a 3D scene anyway as a byproduct.
 
Another tool in the toolbox. I saw something on this same thing around NAB time, may have been the same video clip, all seemed very familiar. I'm not a fan of huge retouching jobs for fashion photography, etc.. I think some of the sales pitch for this technology is a bit misguided. To me it would be more applicable to FX use as Gavin and Richard point out. I also agree with Gavin's assessment of the technology in relation to other options, eg; performance capture.
 
Like MNMB and HDRx™ or any form of image manipulation you don't have to know the specifics to know where they're going to run into problems. You can't synthesize data reliably. You can't modify semi-transparent reliably. You can't 'fill' in holes without assuming a lot. The most reliable way to synthesize information that works with parallax, semi-transparency etc involves breaking it out into a fully 3D scene. At which point you're already re-rendering the scene so you might as well use performance capture.

There'll always be wobbly bits around people made skinnier since it'll have to synthesize what was behind them. It'll always croak on motion blur since it won't be able to determine what is motion blur very easily on a moving background and what is background. That describes most of its applications.

It would be a lot easier than hand animated spline warps on greenscreen footage though.
 
"And once there were real people..."
 
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