Tracking and effects job roles at Framestore

Yesterday i talked to 2 people, the first Chris Cooper head of tracking, and the second Johnny Hann, A director and the lead fx td on Smallville.

Chris Cooper - Tracking:

I have heard from Chris that a profesional tracker needs to be able to manual track a whole shot.
36 is the minimum number of tracks per frame of each shot.
In general framestore use over 100 tracks per frame of each shot to ensure stabillity.

As a runner there already, I need not search for online posted jobs a i know vacant positions currently exist.
Chris says that applicants should have a showreel including different types of shots and camera movements traked, usually with full breakdown to show just trackers on the plate.

Johnny Hann - FX TD:

This position isnt usually advertised, as its really based on your own flare if a company thinks that they need you.

Johnny told me that a sucsessful applicant for this job role would have just the very best examples of they're work on a showreel, with no plain effects on black backgrounds, and definatly no boring unexciting effects such as a beautifully made bonfire.

I think finding this information has helped me direct myself further into getting one of these chosen jobroles 

TRACKING AND MATCHMOVE TUTORIAL

part01


part02


part03


part04


part05


part06


part07


part08

Final Film!

Hey guys, Finally finished it! Here is a break down of what i did for this film:

-All Tracking and matchmoving for the project was done by me
-comet trails and building explosion effects were done by me and sanjay
-amazing acting within the footage itself was done by me, ollie, steph, sanjay, joe, and nick!

effects on the wharf

the Wharf Is TRACKED!!!

Ok so its been a good few days tracking these two shots, but I finaly managed it today.
here is shot 2 of 2 as i just happened to have a test rendered of this one. I cant put up the first yet as i need to use my laptop for working. This concludes all of the tracking I need to do for this project apart from one shot that our director Ollie said was not needed, however if i have enough time i still plan to track this shot, if nothing else than for practice.

why you would not use manual tracking

Ok, so I put this down to a learning experience but Whilst doing our canarey wharf shot I tried a manual camera track. I did this becase I guessed that it would be very hard to correctly get the scale and depth right for our scene, and that this part of our plate was exceptionally blurry and hard to track. Here is exactly why you would never try and manually track......it is horrible :P

Organising and Packaging, Uploading and Schedualing

ok so as for schedualing, we can't really use shot gun for our purposes, however it was definatly still useful learning about it for the future.

so here is my schedual for my work:

Shot

To

Track

01/02/11

Wharf01

05/02/11

Wharf02

09/02/11

Atrium

Date

14/02/11

Stairs

19/02/11

balcony

24/02/11

RenderFarm

dependancy

01/03/11

Corridor01

05/03/11

Burst

08/03/11

Corridor02

13/03/11

Demise

18/03/11

Media

21/03/11

FinalBurst

Atrium Done!

Ok so no that i understand a bit more of the matchmoving and tracking process, I could quite happily track the atrium shot. I surveyed a hell of alot of information with a tape messure, then only used 2 co-ordinates to correctly match the scene and camera. Let the good times role!

Corridor02 DONE!

Ok so sorry i havnt written my progress in a few days. I have had to move to a ew apartment which dosnt yet have an internet connection,  so work has been being done, but blogging hasnt. I have done 2.5 shots since last post. This post will show my work in corridor shot 02.

Geometry and UI  Setup

layers set up





outliner Setup

Smashed it, or 'burst' it rather!

Another shot got ticked off of my checklist today. I sat down this morning and in around 6-7 hours i got VFX_Burst all tracked. It is now a warm feeling to know more or less exactly what i'm trying to achieve. I really applaud the way we have all specialized in our group for this project. If i had tracked 1, 2 or even 3 shots, i still would only have a basic understanding of what i was doing.

This and the last shot are evidence to me alone that I know what i'm doing. I could explain all of my methods but i wont. Needless to say, the matchmove had its own unique problems, which i overcame by keeping a level head and just knuckling down and doing the work! Ive packaged the shot, ready for the animators (and ollie this time) and its ready to go. Here are some snapshots of the work!

to illustrate the point:

Just to re-enforce something i learned a lot earlier:

a word about communicating

Our group functions very well, but how?

I thought it might be good to show how we like to communicate, so as to prove that we are actually doing it!

Firstly, I started a group on facebook as sort of a closed message board to leave updates and other messages on. This is also a good place for us to communicate where and when we will be in to uni or if we are meeting up elsewhere. I have also just used this to communicate with the animators about their next shots:

the second useful way we communicate is through skype. We have a constant message going on, noene of us close it and we always have skype running at all times. This is helpful when having disscussions or working together on shots when physically being in the same place is not possible:

shot4....Done!

Ok so i think im really getting the hang of this now. This was a really nice shot to match as it is a very geometric one. Not alot of useless detail in this one. I started with the pre-modelled corridor i made a while ago. This is the exact thing i wanted to match to so i simply tracked a few sensible points on my plate and matched up 4 or five to the model. All though this was quite a timley process (4-5 hours for some nice tracks) I felt like i knew exactly what i was doing the whole time. and then when it all matched up, i wasnt supprised like before, more relieved that everything i had planned for made sence! So i have packaged this shot and it and the renderfarm shot are ready for the animators as soon as they need them! Here are some images of the work.

Time i showed you the checklist!

It just occured to me this morning that the checklist i have been using for the shots has never been seen by the light of day!!! So here it is in all its pride and glory:
 

VFX SHOT	STATUS	DESCRIPTION
01.CanaryWarf	On hold	A comet is seen destroying part of the canary warf building
02.Atrium	On hold	Creatures are seen entering the atrium
03.Stairs	matched	A creature approaches via the stairs on level 2/3
04.Balcony	matched	A creature crawls up through the gap in the balcony on level 3
05.RenderFarm	matched	A creature runs at the renderfarm window and cracks the glass
06.Corridor	–	A creature approaches through the door and bears down on the party
07.Burst	–	The creature breaks out of the renderfarm
08.Corridor2	–	A second view of corridor creature, still approaching
09.StudioDoor	–	A creature forces its way into the studio with ollie
10.Demise	–	The creature is seen attacking ollie
11.Media	–	Multiple creatures are seen prowling the media room, no exit here!
12.Final Burst	–	A creature bursts through from the studio at the camera. END.

 

New Shot, New Problems

I had read a while ago that you will need to treat each matchmove differently, and i am starting to see that this is true. I aslo read that there are two types of matchmover, the logical and the artistic. The logical matchmover will use all available information to solve a shot, and if no information is present, make educated guesses about length and distances ect. then there are the artistic kind that will engineer solutions to solve problems.

I have just finished my third matchmove and it has been fraught with problems. Firstly the shot was very shakey, the second, there were very few good tracks. After trying and giving up on an easy auto track solution, I tried a few well placed manual tracks. this held no solution to anything as i could not track forward or back for more than a frame or 2. After literally spending a day on this, I thought do or die. I manually tracked every keyframe for every track on this shot. here is the proof. And let me tell you, it was the only way!

So after a long time doing this i finally got a nicely solved co-ordinate system working in matchmover. Now I had the usual task of balancing the focal length of the shot with the real measured geometry and blocking it all in. I had another problem here. Due to the huge lack of trackable information, or due to the poorness of the tracked points, the deapth would not sync with the real geo 100%. and by 100% i mean, one plane of geometry.

everything was messured fine, and no ammount of unrealistic edits to the geo would solve this problem for every frame. Finally i resorted to animating a planar surface to hold this troublesome edge. I have predicted that this will solve our problem however time will tell, and i have no problem re-tackeling this problem if it turns out i have not solved this problem yet.

But this shot has now been packaged and is ready to be taken by the animators! on to shot 4!!!

Two Shots Done!!!

Ok so after leaving the harder atrium shot i got on very well with this shot which I name VFX_StairShot.

the stair shot involved some new challenges as I only had on-set messurements for the geometry behind the camera itself. Now this wasnt necessarily a bad thing. By taking a few more messurements such as step height and depth I just went through starting with the first step in view at the bottom of the shot and modelled out the basic shape, which ''looked right'' in my head. Then i colour corrected m plates as i find this a huge help when auto tracking.

I then tracked and in 2D and solved the camera, imported and it was more or less right. Using a few relations i further corrected this and in around 1 and a half working days I got this shot tracked. I think the total time for this shot was between 12 and 16 hour, a considerable amount of time less than the last 24 to 30 hour first shot. This is good as it shows I am developing. I know These times are no where near proffesional yet. For instance in the book i am reading, It mentions a few times that a matchmover might spend 3 to 4 hours tracking a shot. But I am learning. and not just learning to submit this uni work, Im leaning to learn!


I arranged the scene similar to the first as this got good feedback from my team and from my tutor who approved the use of text and instructions embeded.

Here is a quick render of cubes in situ. nothing special obviously, just a pre-vis or test.

Ive been hard at work!

ok needless to say, i havnt blogged in a while. but that dosnt by any means mean that i havnt been busy!

so this post will fill you in on what ive been up to. I started, after the last matchmove sucsess, with  high hopes on the large atrium shot. This went really well until it went badddddddd. I started with lots of nice well done, well thought out tracks which turned out nicely. Only certain areas needed to be manualy keyframed in clusters, so that was refreshing!. check it out, looks nice huh!:

Ok so then i solved for parralax. Nope. Nada. No paralax here. well ok there is a little.

around the balconys and doors there are a fair amout of simultanious movements that could technically be calculated but there are no strong tracking points there due to motion blur on the camera. So basically the result i came out with was a non-sensical model of the atrium which pulled in and out of accuracy as the shot went on. Rubbish. after a bit of playing i made a managerial descision to pass over this shot until a later date. I believe that with some more practical learning in mm-ing i will find other tips and tricks to help me solve this shot nicely.

Pass it on!

 Ok so I have taken quite a UI approach to setting up my scene to be given to the animators and others in the group. I have set up an Instruction node.

 I have arranged things into layers so that others can easily toggle on and off the visibillity of geometry and camera plate for testing and working with.

Here are the instructions, Placed into the attribute editor on the INSTRUCTIONS poly node.


The outliner is arranged well, with intuitive names to groups and objects within the scene.

Most geometry and camera nodes are locked off so that they are not moved whilst being used to remove problems with rendering later.




FINALY
if you've noticed the Sickly Green material on the geometry that is the default colour of the backgroundShader within maya which will receive shadows and reflections when rendering, but will not have primary visibility. These will need to be balanced on a 'per object' basis later before rendering, but they will work fine whilst testing.

Problem Solver

Ok so im all about solving problems and understanding things properly, so the problems i was having with the Matchmoving i have tackled by reading more, learning more and google troubleshooting. The problem was, that even though I have read about this many times in the last 2 weeks, and however much it was drilled into my head, I had just left the lens and camera information.

Maybe it was because i was worried due to my lack of knowledge or maybe i just forgot. even so I found this to be the problem. It turns out that my camera was doing a whole bunch of crazy things....jumping from nonsensical point to non nonsensical point. then i faced facts and spent 20 minutes finding out the focal length, lens size and height. I input this data and immediately things started to match up a little better. the camera was also in more or less the same place in the scene as sanjay was on the day of filming!

Lastly i went back over some of my tracks, created some point relations which helped place them better within 3D space. Here are some screenshots describing how i further improved the track and then the final matchmove to be submitted to my group for approval.

next I will go into how i have set up the scene to pass on to the animators.

Up up up the zigeral lickety split

ok so last time i left you i was working on the balcony scene, and i just finished it. Yes the time is 5am and i have been up all night really getting to grips with this new skill. first i'll show you what i came up with a few days ago, on the 22nd i think it was...



This wasnt too bad, certainly better than anything i could have done before 2011. But being citical, it is really quite shakey at times, and although not shown by the inserted geometry, there is a problem with depth. The depth is great at the point of the fence, but as you go closer and further than this point, there is an incorect depth occuring due in part to the lens size and focal length of the camera.

So i didnt call this a day with this shot, I reallllly wanted to crack it and understand it, not just 'wing it'! So in the next post I will go into how I solved and understood this problem.

Matching Up camera moves and scenes

Ok so I put the footage I sorted out earlyer today into matchmover and after using the processes i have developed over the last week with my tests, I eventualy had enough track points at strategic places in my scene to sucsessfully solve the camera.

With this solved camera, i imported to maya and things matched up more or less perectly. on on e wall there was a slight bit of re-modelling, HOWEVER after consulting my notes from the day of the shoot, the set is actually much closer than what i had! With this scene more or less sucsessfully matchmoved, I will now go in and model all of the extra props needed so I can pass this scene on to our animators Joe and Nick.

Over all i am very happy with how this project is progressing. Our team is working perfectly with each other and everyone seems busy and happy. A couple of notes on what Ive seen on my collegues work is that our Animators are very good, they have completed some test walkcycles *seen earlyer in a matchmove test* with a downloaded rig similar to the one we will use. Our compositor is hard at work learning a new program from scratch using tutorials! our modelling department (ollie) is working at maximum awesomness and our creature is looking amazing! and finaly our rigging department (sanjay) is working very efficiently, following practices of another rigger, i forget who! but its looking really nice and fluid, the weights look great!

I am pretyy happy with my progress, I have solved one matchmove on our footage so far, and as for the footage itself I have made it workable (see interlaced and progressive problems earlyer) I feel very busy, and thats the way I like it. I've made sure that I know my responsibillitys for this project and Im working and planning accordingly.

De-interlacing

Ok so as i said i had to de-interlace our 25fps 1080i footage to become 50fps 1080p footage. After some internet research i found a couple of methods and ran through them both, and in the end used the most easy to understand. the first had me use filters and effects within premier, which i was unsure about as i did not want the footage to be evaluated differently in different places within the plate.

the second method had me import the footage into a 25fps 1080i project, then out put through adobe encoder as a 50fps 1080p tiff sequence. This was not a hard process to go through but its done wonders for our footage. Below is a slightly zoomed region of first the interlaced plate, then the progresive plate.

Interlaced:

Progressive

So what is Interlaced footage???

Ok so i have read up about interlaced and progressive footage and I now have a solid understanding of what is going on. First lets start with PROGRESSIVE.

Ok so all animators should be familiar with this. 25 frames persecond = 1 frame for every 1/25th of a second right? all tikety boo. now say you wanted higher quality, maybe step up to 50fps? so how many frames do you get now?? yep just testing you, 1 frame for every 1/50th of a second. ALL FINE.

Here is an example of some frames, for arguments sake imagine that this is a small snippet from a 50fps sequence:

F1 (50fps)









F2 (50fps)








F3 (50fps)







F4 (50fps)

F5 (50fps)








Hopefuly that all makes sense. If it dosnt maybe film and vfx are not for you....

But what about INTERLACED???

Ok so now say you wanted to broadcast, or stream 50fps of 1080p? sorry bub, aint gonna happen. wayyy too much data flying down the line. Enter Interlaced footage!

Interlaced footage is designed to produce a much clearer representation of motion, giving a fluidity to the picture, and removing any flashing or missed key frames, such as in sports. It is also designed to double the rate at which you perceive the fps of the footage. so somthing thats 25fps can look sorta like somthing thats 50fps! upscaling 25fps>50fps* and being able to broadcast at the same time!!! sounds good huh? NOPE.

I have a severe dislike for this format. remeber the image sequence of my head? ow lets see what the frames would look like with interlaced quality. (remember were going from 50fps to 25fps)

 F1 (25fps)

 F2 (25fps)

F3 (25fps)








WHAT THE HELL! why would you ever want this?? well its understandable that i dont like it. as I want to work in the vfx industry, imagine my disgust over blured, ghosty liney pixley horrible images...

but the fact is that this old format is still good in some respects, such as broadcast. However as soon as technology advances to the stage where 1080p 50fps can be sent into your telly box, its sure to die instantly!

So now to set about converting i to p.

Ohhh thats what that is!!!

Ok so i tried taking that line-y footage into matchmover knowing that there would be a problem. and surprise surprise there was. out of the thousands of auto tracks i applied to the image (with a minimum track length of only 25) only 10 or so stuck. and they were baaaaaad.

I then tried manually tracking one point and after 15 minutes I had half a track line that looked like crap. The problem was that I couldnt even see properly where to place the track points, the footage was that bad. (see photo below)

Enough was enough, I typed in the camera name and details of the fault, and spent a long while trying to find anything about this problem. That is until i found out it wasnt even a problem.....

It turns out what we shot in was 1080i, not 1080p. I was a bit unsure what the differense is between progressive and interlaced, but now I'm sure. Apparently Adobe Premier and after effects are set up to de-interlace footage, so I will research a little more and do two posts, one about i & p, one about how to convert 1 to the other.

Blocking out CG set in Maya

OK so I've now taken my illustrator floor plan into Maya and used it in conjunk with the vert snapping to accurately block out our walls and doors. Due to it being late, and not having as much data as i would like due to our tight filming schedule on the day,  there is still much to add in. Tomorrow my plan is to build in the last few recoreded areas of the plan, then see if i have enough footage (and subsequent tracking data) to add in the rest. If not, no problem, just back to uni! Here are some pics of what I have so far: