I phrased it poorly, what I meant is what you're saying- that there needs to be a gap of time between the people you are showing it to, and the year of the technology. You could do people of the year 2000 with 2100 tech, but not 2100 people with 2100 tech.
Bah, I can't phrase this right at all. Thank you for stating it better.
Are you an Aslyum refugee or another of the recent closures? del Toro just opened up a new shop in Marina Del Rey, might be worth checking out if you're looking for work- called Miranda.
It's the problem of the tail wagging the dog. The VFX department is so large, and builds such a momentum, only the strongest-willed directors have the force to keep them in check.
You are insane. VFX companies are entirely at the will of the director/studio heads. Please cite an example of it being the other way around.
Actually, production companies mostly allocate money to themselves. VFX companies have been dropping like bees lately from bankruptcy as clients demand more, better work faster and for less money.
Sorry, mocap is bullshit. Directors and behind the scenes DVDs and video games love to go on and on about it because it sounds great, but the actual data generated by mocap is almost never used. What happens if that mocap data is generated. The director sees it and says it looks fake, than points to the reference footage shot during mocap and says: Make it look like that!
The animators than use the 380x260 reference footage to animate the entire thing from scratch. The bad animation you are talking about is bad animation. The good animation you are attributing to mocap is just good animation.
I don't believe you're quoting him correctly- it's sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic to people back then. He meant that if you traveled to 1810 with a flying car, it'd just be magic to the natives of the time. They don't even grasp automobiles and you're showing them something so many steps removed from a horse and carriage that they can't make the jump.
It's not supposed to be applied to people of today with technology of today.
This times 1000. We have the tools now, but very little worth putting them to use on.
I wish people would stop saying that the VFX are ruining moves. We're a tool used by the director (or, more often, by the studio) if that Director (or again, the studio) fail to utilize us within the story properly, how is it the VFX that are ruining movies?
Creating the VFX of Keanu fighting a raptor on top of a truck that's racing around the deck off a cruise liner that's going to explode if it goes below the speed of sound isn't just pressing a render button on a computer? Just because the tools of the trade have advanced to the point where we're finally creating very impressive but invisible effects, that doesn't make the job any easier.
I guess if no one is in physical danger of death (unless you count working 12-16 hour days 7 days a week for 3-6 months in a row), it just doesn't impress anymore.
It's more expensive to shoot in 3d. It's a lot harder to shoot in 3d. It's fairly cheap to get low end VFX companies to underbid each other to do a crummy 6 week stereoscopic conversion.
Either in camera or post done cheaply looks like shit. Post done well looks okay, but in camera done well will always blow it out of the water.
The real problem is a lack of Film crews experienced and able to shoot 3d in camera well. Combined with an INCREDIBLE variety of camera rigs and technology, shooting in 3d is no picnic.
This is actually a big problem. The standard left right offset of the film cameras themselves is larger than a child's eyes- resulting in a poor or headache inducing 3d effect. Certain children's movies have adjusted the distance between the lenses to reflect a child's eyes better (such as Spy Kids 3d) others have ignored it.
IMAX 3d is significantly different from other 3d technologies. Put simply, IMAX technology was done first, and is linear. Left eye is horizontal polarized, right eye is vertical. That means no tilting of your head!
RealD technology (normal movie screens, not IMAX), use circular polorization. One eye is clockwise one eye is counterclockwise. Do not ask me how that works. The result is that you can sit off center and tilt your head. If you're seeing a 3d movie, don't buy the IMAX hype.
(Note: I might have mixed up which eye is horz and which is vert. Forgive me)
The hackers attempted to order a macbook pro. I called Apple support- who kept asking what product I was having a problem with. One insisted that I was viewing the Apple website through a Mac, so therefore the problem was actually with the Mac.
Apparently they have no technical support/hacking section for their website- account issues don't exist according to them. I was finally able to reach level 2 tech support after faking a problem with my Macbook; where the account was flagged and order canceled.
That's not AE CS5, that's a student project demonstrated at Siggraph a year(2?) ago. I'm sure Adobe would love the technology, and might have made moves to buy it, but that video is straight from the student demo.
Thanks man! Truth be told, I really need to remove that Love Guru building shot from the reel- it's only there to demonstrate that I know(knew?) Massive, a crowd generating software. It's not a very good example of compositing:(
Before and Afters are really critical to see what was done in a shot and how well it was done- but most VFX shops/Movie studios refuse to give befores to artists.. and then those same shops/studios when hiring ask for reels with before/afters- how the heck is that supposed to work?
Since that reel (I need to update it.. that's like mid 08), I've done work on Benjamin Button, Star Trek, Night at the Museum 2 and a little movie called Cabin in the Woods; but I won't have befores for any of those:(
Well, there's really nothing stopping people who want to manipulate the news to do so now- remember that photo Iran used to show it launched a bunch of missiles- but it turns out 2 of them were photoshopped in?
We commonly now do things like crowd removal, crowd duplication, removing garbage (AKA bodies?) from shots- and the software is all desktop based that will run okay on cheap PCs. The difference is the skill that accomplishes those things is still based in people- people who for the most part are based in Australia, US, UK, Europe.
The up and coming VFX regions are India, China and the Indochina area. Right now they're used for cheap basic film tasks; but in 10 years they'll have the technique and expertise down and a few shops there could easily match what the average shop here puts out.
With stuff like this in video, it's probably a little cause for concern but even if the technology is 5 years away, it'll still be detectable in 5 years if they don't have the talent to clean it up normally.
The key thing is getting it not to chatter or flicker, which it probably will- as I doubt it will generate the exact same results frame to frame. Nevertheless- expect it to make matte painting, wire removal, etc a lot easier. I expect they'll use it to generate a quick starting point for clean plates, which will then be given further refinements and then composited in normally.
After watching the video and seeing obvious problems even at 360p, it seems unlikely it'd hold up at 2k without some love at least.
"Visual Effects Artists, if you measure by the number of man-hours worked, are a relatively small portion of the labor that goes into a movie, even one like Avatar or Titanic."
A movie like Transformers or Avatar can have hundreds to just under a thousand people working on the VFX for anywhere from 6 months to year (for the main portion- R&D will occur during and before principle photography).
More people will work on the VFX side will appear onscreen, or during principle photography.
Don't believe me? It's the best example (and one you cited) but take a look at the Avatar imdb page:
Probably over a thousand people on that full cast and crew list, and the VFX division starts at 20-25% down and continues until you're 85% down the page- and that's not taking into account that the post production processes (especially on a movie like Avatar) go on for much longer than principle photography.
So, more people for more time equals more man hours- thats the mathematical point of the argument, but it wasn't the point I was trying to make.
The point I was trying to make is that no one went to see Shia Lebouf in Transformers or Zoe Saldana in Avatar- they went to see the Visual Effects- and in this day and age that's becoming pretty common.
I am not trying to argue that VFX workers are more important than grips, teamsters, actors, DPs or Directors; all I'm trying to say is that when Hollywood begins to rely on VFX for it's blockbusters, VFX workers deserve the same deal everyone else in the business is getting- wage guarantees, contract abuse protection, healthcare, residuals that pay into benefits, etc.
Take a look at the worldwide box office list, http://boxofficemojo.com/alltime/world/ and ask yourself how many of those movies relied heavily on VFX. As far as I can see, in the top 10 only 2, Titanic and Dark Knight, aren't "VFX Movies" but they still had incredibly amounts of VFX work in them- every movie made today (even romantic comedies) will usually have hundreds of shots that go into VFX (if for nothing more than zit fixes).
I actually posted my comment because I agree with you about video game developers needing a union.
As for people being against it, there are plenty- movie producers will scream bloody murder when the movement gets stronger; other unions will be worried that their benefits will be eroded (a Visual Effects credit cannot currently come before a 1st Unit Director credit; which is usually in the credit roll- I think VFX supervisor deserves an intro credit right there along with Director of Photography), and some VFX workers themselves are strongly against it.
It's a long hard road, and because of pressure from China and ease of entry into the industry, it might not make it.
Visual Effects Artists, arguably the workers directly responsible for the highest grossing films of all time, are not organized.
They're in a very similar position to game developers- short term projects followed by firings, no health care, OT scheduling shenanigans, etc etc.
But all that looks like it might change soon- recent abuses and popularity of VFX movies is making more artists aware that they're getting the raw deal in the movie industry.
I don't know of any citations for this, but what he describes is pretty much business as usual in the VFX world right now. Animators use the filmed footage and crummy NTSC reference to animate matching facial expressions as data received from tracking never has anywhere near enough resolution.
Avatar might have been different, but looking at the footage of the actors, you're probably looking at the magnum opus of some extremely talented technical animators.
There's a program that claims to be able to do it automagically...
In case you missed it, *all* the actors you saw on screen were CG'ed from motion capture. They captured the muscle movements of the actors and used that as the basis for CG. All those wrinkles on Weaver's human character? CG. They didn't have to put them there. They could make her appear as a 20-year-old, or as a man.
Uhm. No. Most of the actors you saw on screen were keyed and then composited in to CG environments.
I was not trying to say it looked fake- not at all. I don't think it can be qualified as photoreal when a colorist has jacked up the saturation 200% (thank God it was turned down from the 400% Saturation it was at during early previews), but I also don't think that's a problem with any of the technology.
You and I are probably in total agreement that the textures, modeling, shading etc were all 100% up to photoreal par- they just weren't taken in a "photoreal" direction; a move I feel resulted in some real scenes (like your green screen helicopter) look fake because they were pushed past what we know is normal in comp or coloring.
What I was more trying to say was that the avatar technology was cool, but it's not some kind of omni-drug. It won't solve all of humanities woes and sometimes there are other methods that have already proven effective at something.
In VFX there are ten ways to do any one thing; and god knows I'm a fan of doing things a complicated new, expensive way just because it's complicated and new; but I just wanted to say, making actors younger has been done before, and the uncanny valley still hasn't been addressed.
Those weren't humans, they were blue skinned aliens with very different facial features. The uncanny valley was not addressed, so we have no idea how this "photoreal" technology stands up to that close inspection.
I'm far far FAR from unbiased on this, but if you wanted to speculate on making actors look younger, you'd still be better served looking at Benjamin Button.
I'm sick of paying 35 dollars a month for "unlimited" data that I don't use, and 5 dollars for 200 (or 4 Kbs) of text messages.
Most of the time I am on a wifi network; when I am not, I don't use much data anyway.
Stick the 3 GB price point at 30 dollars, 2 at 20; 1 GB at 10, etc.
Also, it should be further tiered based on what data connection you are using. Us original iPhone users got royally screwed when AT&T upped the rates because the 3g came out.
But who am I kidding? We all know if this happened, the starting price would be 30 dollars for 200 MB of data, and an additional 10 dollars for every 100 MB.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course. Does a painter not often sit in front of the scene they are painting?
I phrased it poorly, what I meant is what you're saying- that there needs to be a gap of time between the people you are showing it to, and the year of the technology. You could do people of the year 2000 with 2100 tech, but not 2100 people with 2100 tech.
Bah, I can't phrase this right at all. Thank you for stating it better.
Are you an Aslyum refugee or another of the recent closures? del Toro just opened up a new shop in Marina Del Rey, might be worth checking out if you're looking for work- called Miranda.
Also, this is my favorite comment in this thread:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1910342&cid=34553970
This is an excellent comment with excellent points, thank you. With those well stated points I would have to agree, it works as an enabler.
It's the problem of the tail wagging the dog. The VFX department is so large, and builds such a momentum, only the strongest-willed directors have the force to keep them in check.
You are insane. VFX companies are entirely at the will of the director/studio heads. Please cite an example of it being the other way around.
Actually, production companies mostly allocate money to themselves. VFX companies have been dropping like bees lately from bankruptcy as clients demand more, better work faster and for less money.
Sorry, mocap is bullshit. Directors and behind the scenes DVDs and video games love to go on and on about it because it sounds great, but the actual data generated by mocap is almost never used. What happens if that mocap data is generated. The director sees it and says it looks fake, than points to the reference footage shot during mocap and says: Make it look like that!
The animators than use the 380x260 reference footage to animate the entire thing from scratch. The bad animation you are talking about is bad animation. The good animation you are attributing to mocap is just good animation.
I don't believe you're quoting him correctly- it's sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic to people back then. He meant that if you traveled to 1810 with a flying car, it'd just be magic to the natives of the time. They don't even grasp automobiles and you're showing them something so many steps removed from a horse and carriage that they can't make the jump.
It's not supposed to be applied to people of today with technology of today.
This times 1000. We have the tools now, but very little worth putting them to use on.
I wish people would stop saying that the VFX are ruining moves. We're a tool used by the director (or, more often, by the studio) if that Director (or again, the studio) fail to utilize us within the story properly, how is it the VFX that are ruining movies?
Creating the VFX of Keanu fighting a raptor on top of a truck that's racing around the deck off a cruise liner that's going to explode if it goes below the speed of sound isn't just pressing a render button on a computer? Just because the tools of the trade have advanced to the point where we're finally creating very impressive but invisible effects, that doesn't make the job any easier.
I guess if no one is in physical danger of death (unless you count working 12-16 hour days 7 days a week for 3-6 months in a row), it just doesn't impress anymore.
It's more expensive to shoot in 3d. It's a lot harder to shoot in 3d. It's fairly cheap to get low end VFX companies to underbid each other to do a crummy 6 week stereoscopic conversion.
Either in camera or post done cheaply looks like shit. Post done well looks okay, but in camera done well will always blow it out of the water.
The real problem is a lack of Film crews experienced and able to shoot 3d in camera well. Combined with an INCREDIBLE variety of camera rigs and technology, shooting in 3d is no picnic.
This is actually a big problem. The standard left right offset of the film cameras themselves is larger than a child's eyes- resulting in a poor or headache inducing 3d effect. Certain children's movies have adjusted the distance between the lenses to reflect a child's eyes better (such as Spy Kids 3d) others have ignored it.
IMAX 3d is significantly different from other 3d technologies. Put simply, IMAX technology was done first, and is linear. Left eye is horizontal polarized, right eye is vertical. That means no tilting of your head!
RealD technology (normal movie screens, not IMAX), use circular polorization. One eye is clockwise one eye is counterclockwise. Do not ask me how that works. The result is that you can sit off center and tilt your head. If you're seeing a 3d movie, don't buy the IMAX hype.
(Note: I might have mixed up which eye is horz and which is vert. Forgive me)
The hackers attempted to order a macbook pro. I called Apple support- who kept asking what product I was having a problem with. One insisted that I was viewing the Apple website through a Mac, so therefore the problem was actually with the Mac.
Apparently they have no technical support/hacking section for their website- account issues don't exist according to them. I was finally able to reach level 2 tech support after faking a problem with my Macbook; where the account was flagged and order canceled.
That's not AE CS5, that's a student project demonstrated at Siggraph a year(2?) ago. I'm sure Adobe would love the technology, and might have made moves to buy it, but that video is straight from the student demo.
Thanks man! Truth be told, I really need to remove that Love Guru building shot from the reel- it's only there to demonstrate that I know(knew?) Massive, a crowd generating software. It's not a very good example of compositing :(
Before and Afters are really critical to see what was done in a shot and how well it was done- but most VFX shops/Movie studios refuse to give befores to artists.. and then those same shops/studios when hiring ask for reels with before/afters- how the heck is that supposed to work?
Since that reel (I need to update it.. that's like mid 08), I've done work on Benjamin Button, Star Trek, Night at the Museum 2 and a little movie called Cabin in the Woods; but I won't have befores for any of those :(
Well, there's really nothing stopping people who want to manipulate the news to do so now- remember that photo Iran used to show it launched a bunch of missiles- but it turns out 2 of them were photoshopped in?
We commonly now do things like crowd removal, crowd duplication, removing garbage (AKA bodies?) from shots- and the software is all desktop based that will run okay on cheap PCs. The difference is the skill that accomplishes those things is still based in people- people who for the most part are based in Australia, US, UK, Europe.
The up and coming VFX regions are India, China and the Indochina area. Right now they're used for cheap basic film tasks; but in 10 years they'll have the technique and expertise down and a few shops there could easily match what the average shop here puts out.
With stuff like this in video, it's probably a little cause for concern but even if the technology is 5 years away, it'll still be detectable in 5 years if they don't have the talent to clean it up normally.
Now, 20 years from now.. Oh boy.
The key thing is getting it not to chatter or flicker, which it probably will- as I doubt it will generate the exact same results frame to frame. Nevertheless- expect it to make matte painting, wire removal, etc a lot easier. I expect they'll use it to generate a quick starting point for clean plates, which will then be given further refinements and then composited in normally.
After watching the video and seeing obvious problems even at 360p, it seems unlikely it'd hold up at 2k without some love at least.
"Visual Effects Artists, if you measure by the number of man-hours worked, are a relatively small portion of the labor that goes into a movie, even one like Avatar or Titanic."
A movie like Transformers or Avatar can have hundreds to just under a thousand people working on the VFX for anywhere from 6 months to year (for the main portion- R&D will occur during and before principle photography).
More people will work on the VFX side will appear onscreen, or during principle photography.
Don't believe me? It's the best example (and one you cited) but take a look at the Avatar imdb page:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0499549/fullcredits#cast
Probably over a thousand people on that full cast and crew list, and the VFX division starts at 20-25% down and continues until you're 85% down the page- and that's not taking into account that the post production processes (especially on a movie like Avatar) go on for much longer than principle photography.
So, more people for more time equals more man hours- thats the mathematical point of the argument, but it wasn't the point I was trying to make.
The point I was trying to make is that no one went to see Shia Lebouf in Transformers or Zoe Saldana in Avatar- they went to see the Visual Effects- and in this day and age that's becoming pretty common.
I am not trying to argue that VFX workers are more important than grips, teamsters, actors, DPs or Directors; all I'm trying to say is that when Hollywood begins to rely on VFX for it's blockbusters, VFX workers deserve the same deal everyone else in the business is getting- wage guarantees, contract abuse protection, healthcare, residuals that pay into benefits, etc.
Take a look at the worldwide box office list,
http://boxofficemojo.com/alltime/world/
and ask yourself how many of those movies relied heavily on VFX. As far as I can see, in the top 10 only 2, Titanic and Dark Knight, aren't "VFX Movies" but they still had incredibly amounts of VFX work in them- every movie made today (even romantic comedies) will usually have hundreds of shots that go into VFX (if for nothing more than zit fixes).
I actually posted my comment because I agree with you about video game developers needing a union.
As for people being against it, there are plenty- movie producers will scream bloody murder when the movement gets stronger; other unions will be worried that their benefits will be eroded (a Visual Effects credit cannot currently come before a 1st Unit Director credit; which is usually in the credit roll- I think VFX supervisor deserves an intro credit right there along with Director of Photography), and some VFX workers themselves are strongly against it.
It's a long hard road, and because of pressure from China and ease of entry into the industry, it might not make it.
Visual Effects Artists, arguably the workers directly responsible for the highest grossing films of all time, are not organized.
They're in a very similar position to game developers- short term projects followed by firings, no health care, OT scheduling shenanigans, etc etc.
But all that looks like it might change soon- recent abuses and popularity of VFX movies is making more artists aware that they're getting the raw deal in the movie industry.
http://www.fxguide.com/qt/2187/open-letter-and-animation-guild-updates
I don't know of any citations for this, but what he describes is pretty much business as usual in the VFX world right now. Animators use the filmed footage and crummy NTSC reference to animate matching facial expressions as data received from tracking never has anywhere near enough resolution.
Avatar might have been different, but looking at the footage of the actors, you're probably looking at the magnum opus of some extremely talented technical animators.
There's a program that claims to be able to do it automagically...
In case you missed it, *all* the actors you saw on screen were CG'ed from motion capture. They captured the muscle movements of the actors and used that as the basis for CG. All those wrinkles on Weaver's human character? CG. They didn't have to put them there. They could make her appear as a 20-year-old, or as a man.
Uhm. No. Most of the actors you saw on screen were keyed and then composited in to CG environments.
I was not trying to say it looked fake- not at all. I don't think it can be qualified as photoreal when a colorist has jacked up the saturation 200% (thank God it was turned down from the 400% Saturation it was at during early previews), but I also don't think that's a problem with any of the technology.
You and I are probably in total agreement that the textures, modeling, shading etc were all 100% up to photoreal par- they just weren't taken in a "photoreal" direction; a move I feel resulted in some real scenes (like your green screen helicopter) look fake because they were pushed past what we know is normal in comp or coloring.
What I was more trying to say was that the avatar technology was cool, but it's not some kind of omni-drug. It won't solve all of humanities woes and sometimes there are other methods that have already proven effective at something.
In VFX there are ten ways to do any one thing; and god knows I'm a fan of doing things a complicated new, expensive way just because it's complicated and new; but I just wanted to say, making actors younger has been done before, and the uncanny valley still hasn't been addressed.
PS: You have a website?
Those weren't humans, they were blue skinned aliens with very different facial features. The uncanny valley was not addressed, so we have no idea how this "photoreal" technology stands up to that close inspection.
I'm far far FAR from unbiased on this, but if you wanted to speculate on making actors look younger, you'd still be better served looking at Benjamin Button.
And included text messages in "data"
I'm sick of paying 35 dollars a month for "unlimited" data that I don't use, and 5 dollars for 200 (or 4 Kbs) of text messages.
Most of the time I am on a wifi network; when I am not, I don't use much data anyway.
Stick the 3 GB price point at 30 dollars, 2 at 20; 1 GB at 10, etc.
Also, it should be further tiered based on what data connection you are using. Us original iPhone users got royally screwed when AT&T upped the rates because the 3g came out.
But who am I kidding? We all know if this happened, the starting price would be 30 dollars for 200 MB of data, and an additional 10 dollars for every 100 MB.