August 27, 2006

EN: Fighting with HDV Compression Artifacts

I knew before I started shooting with HDV that I would face problems in postproduction when it comes to bluescreening and color correction. Just the amount of problem I would face was always in question. Well lets put it that way: If you are doing any filming and plan on doing ANY postproduction forget about HDV alltogether. I have never seen a worse quality movie under my fingertips and I deeply regret going HDV now. All resolution advantages go out the window if you do even the slightest bit of contrast or individual color correction and the image looks like it has been blown up from 160x120 badly compressed webmovie. The whole picture - even with a locked off camera that has minimal movement starts to shift and wobble. I do not understand how anyone would buy such a camera or even recommend it - especially for VJing where you almost always add coloring effects onto the picture. Its bad and if there is gain grain in the picture shots are almost absolutely unusable. Bluescreens have huge edges that even badly shoot DV footage can do better (and it bad there already). HDV is a a technology that can easely be skipped if you are in the market for a new camera get the Panasonic which has twice the compression data rate then the "normal" HDV cameras and hope that this gives you a bit more room. I fully understand now why professionals talk about "doing everything in camera" with HDV because the footage that you shoot is the footage that you get. I am introducing heavy graining to divert from the compression artifacts now and it has cost me 4 days to pull a decent bluescreen. If you have the choice between HDV and something uncompressed normal resolution go with the uncompressed normal resolution you will have better quality after all.

Posted by fALk at 12:35 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 17, 2006

EN: Game Engine with Realtime Global Illumination, SubDs and Displacement

fantasylabgameengine.png It was just a matter of time - but noone really was expecting it so early. Fantasylab - a california based video game developing company has created a new game engine that features global illumination - in realtime. Why is this so significant? Well Global Illumination enables self glowing objects, softshadows and all kinds of other real world lightning effects and in the end would give a movie making application that sits on top of this game engine a very realistic output that - by judging from the pictures - gives you a quality that comes close to the first Pixar Toy Story Movie - in real time without a renderfarm. On top of GI this render engine can also handle subdivision models and displacement mapping to give the characters unpreceded detail in an realtime environment. The days of the overnight 3d renderers are counted I guess.

More Infos on their site:http://www.fantasylab.com/newPages/FantasyEngineFeatures.html

Posted by fALk at 10:07 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

March 23, 2006

EN: Advancements in Facial Animation

facerobot.pngAs my final project will be a character driven story I have to decide if I am going with real actors or digitial ones. As my time is limited I actually already throw out the digital actors idea - I already have modeled one character and have started to rig her but what really made me stop was the facial animation part.
I can trick a lot with the actual body movement set certain camera angels etc but what I would not get is any realism or any believability in the face on my own in less then four month. The idea got scraped but still for a future project I want to cut out the real life actor - or at least just use real actors for motion capture.
So when I watched the second part (fast forward to about half the movie) of the last videopodcast from the cgchannel (its big) I was extremely impressed with Softimages new program called FaceRobot. Not that it will ease the pain of the actual animation parameters much but the solver for muscles and layering animations and the whole setup process is taking about half a month out of a good facial animation - yes you heard it right about half a month time spend on setting up the character is solved in about 10 - 30 minutes with this program if it works as shown in the demonstration (which uses a pre-configered mesh so milage may vary). Then again there is the price: $14,995. Yes that puts us back to square one in the 3d pricing. I really thought we are away from the astronomical prices of the past in the 3d market - especially since Softimage is touting its "3Democracy" with pricing their flagship product in the sub $1,000 dollar range. Now fifteen-thousand dollars won´t get them a foothold in the market that has less and less money anyways - so for now at least facial animation is still hard labour for the small indy studio and I think companies like pixologic with its groundbraking z-brush tool might fire another shot in that direction soon - one hopes.

Update: I read the wrong price. The $14,995 is only for the animation part of the tool. The designer with the aforementioned solver is $94,995. Excuse me thats ONEHUNDREDTHOUSANDDOLLARS for a piece of software thats gonna be absolute with the next version in a year. Are they kidding?

Posted by fALk at 06:42 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack