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Natural/Hand-held camera path app
Hey all, I wanted to do a quick check if there would be any interest in a tool I built to solve a problem. Basically I needed a handheld camera shot with a particular motion around an object, and hand-animating the path would have been too laborious. Instead I wrote an app that let me physically make the camera motion I wanted with a smartphone, and export it as keyframes.
This worked better than filming the shot and trying to extract a camera track, as it was faster to iterate on, I could use more dramatic movements, and I didn’t need to worry about feature points being in frame. It’s centimeter-accurate and I have the camera on-screen so its possible to use real-world framing/scale cues.
The app is in a real rough state currently (I’m manually extracting the takes, running a script on my PC to convert them etc) but if theres interest I was thinking of polishing it up so it can handle multiple takes easily and upload the tracks to a site so you can just download and import them directly (maybe even to the level of Ctrl-C Ctrl-V in After Effects).
So I guess the question is; have you had a job where this tool would have come in handy? And would you have paid to save the time & effort of doing it manually/via tracking footage? (I’m also thinking it could be used for object motion too, but for now I think camera motion is the most obvious).
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4 Replies
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A few years ago I was looking everywhere for this! I’d definitely be interested.
– Spencer
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Great! So I’m not crazy! (maybe)
What shot were you trying to make? Did you end up hand-animating it, or shooting it with a camera and trying to extract the path?
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Don’t even remember what the shot was anymore… I just hand animated it.
– Spencer
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I’ll bet there would be a lot of interest in this if you can get it to work smoothly. I’d love it.
– The Great Szalam
(The \’Great\’ stands for \’Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble\’)No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.
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