There is a great interview in Variety with James Cameron and his perspective on 3D films (pun intended). Of course, what he says is quite convincing, and salient. I met him once. He made some convincingly salient points then too. Via Daring Fireball, via John August.
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It is always interesting when you take a diversion from concentrating on “visual effects” and go see what other people are doing with graphics technology. In many ways, the SIGGRAPH conference is a yearly fix of all things interesting, but you have to stop working to get there, and residing outside of the US doesn’t make it any easier. The alternative time-sucking solution, is web surfing.
Sometimes you come across something which really gives you a jolt. The work Robert Hodgin does is clever and beautiful:
Solar, with lyrics. from flight404 on Vimeo.
He uses Processing, an open-source programming environment for graphics and audio. See their exhibition space for more examples of what can be done. Robert Hodgin has a bit of his stuff on that page too, and great explanations of how the software was used (Birds/Flocking).
I’ve become quite interested in procedural animation of late, and have been wondering what we can do with Massive (and a bit of time) to create some visualisations. We’ve done a bit of stuff on films using Massive to create things other than crowds (like traffic, pedestrians, etc); so another logical step would be to use it with some input data to drive different aspects of it… hmmm… music clip anyone? With the right input data, I am sure you could make something quite special.
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RED announced the following new cameras, which I am sure will be dissected and analysed (and changed) over the next year or so. Release in 2009:
SCARLET – 3k resolution, supposedly under $3000; 2/3 sensor; fixed lens 8x T2.8 zoom. http://www.red.com/nab/scarlet. More information here. And a off the floor video via Videomaker:
EPIC – 5k resolution, ~$30,000; RED One owners get a 100% trade in; Full S35 sensor. http://www.red.com/nab/epic
Red Ray – a (blue ray?) based playback system up to 4k. http://www.red.com/nab/red_ray
Oh yeah, and some lenses.
The full S35 sensor in EPIC makes sense, especially with all the features that seem to have embraced the RED camera. The SCARLET will give Sony/Canon/Panasonic something to think about in that market (and a few other markets). As long as RED don’t crash and burn (my mother always warned me about things that seem too good to be true), I wouldn’t want to have an extensive future investment in telecines or film scanners. I wonder when the digital competitors will get themselves into gear?
May we all see like insects: light fields and plenoptic lenses. There could well be an interesting shift in specialised photography where extracting 3D data from digital images shot with either special lenses or sensors (and with a lot of post-processing/number crunching) become useful tools for VFX practitioners.
(Full disclosure: like most people, I’ve had a lenticular fascination since I was a kid. I just didn’t know what to call it…)
Now, of the technology, the immediate, demonstrated applications are variable focus (in post); or the ability to move the camera and change perspective within about a 10° arc. While this is something readily achievable in a layered composite, the implications of it being readily available and nicely packaged with a bow are quite interesting (see: focus stacking, helicon focus). And, if (if!) it can be applied to moving images, then there would depth information that you could use to extract layers. That is, you wouldn’t have to pull a key; you could go without green-screen; rotoscoping would be easy… oh, the possibilities… Okay, I’m getting way ahead of the technology.
But then, beyond the “3D” hype, there have been a lot of recent, significant developments in sensor technology, such as the Panasonic high dynamic range sensor… and even the CIA is hocking its image technology. Yes, the Central Intelligence Agency. Insert your conspiracy theories here. How about the Gigapan $300 (?) photo-robot…
While we may wait for a new digital camera in the coming months, we should probably bear in mind that Moore’s Law can be applied to digital photography and cinematography…
More reading: Refocus Imaging; Max Hodges comments; Stephen Shankland article; Photography 2.0/R&D…
Read MoreThis is a very interesting (100 minute!) panel discussion featuring various computer graphics industry legends (details below), who pretty much have the Bay Area and Pixar in common… anyway, this is not a super-tech, jargon-filled discussion – rather it is more like an oral history of computer graphics.
[Recorded May 16, 2005]
Brad Bird, Writer/Director, The Incredibles, Pixar Animation Studios, Ed Catmull, Co-Founder and President, Pixar Animation Studios, Alvy Ray Smith, Co-Founder of four centers of computer graphics excellence (Altamira, Pixar, Lucasfilm, New York Tech) and a Microsoft Fellow, Andrew Stanton, Writer/ Director, Finding Nemo, Pixar Animation Studios , and Michael Rubin, Moderator, Author of Droidmaker: George Lucas and the Digital Revolution
My first real computer was the Commodore Vic 20. I did have contact with computers before that (mainly Apple II’s at friends houses), but I was excited enough to spend a large part of my Saturday mornings in 1982 typing—via hunt-and-peck—small programs from magazines. Mainly they were games and mainly they didn’t work. “Syntax Error” was the bane of my life. When something did work, the computer graphics usually consisted of an “@” or a couple or greater-than symbols,or anything else you could find on a keyboard. It did, however, teach me to type.
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