Re: How long before this becomes a $99 filter? ;)

[Walter Soyka]

[Bob Woodhead] “What primary app do you use for the mapping?”

On the display side, we’ve worked with lighting and video companies using various different media servers — mainly Pandora’s Box, but a little bit of WATCHOUT, too. We’ve just started one that will run on D3.

On the content side, C4D and Ae.

[Bob Woodhead] “How’s the prepro time?”

Like many other projects, preproduction is like a gas, and the calendar is the tank: a gas expands to fill the volume of its container, and if the container is too small, the gas is under immense heat and pressure!

The catch with projection mapping is that you generally need to work in full 3D instead of just 2D or 2.5D, and you need good lighting with great shadows to sell the illusion of depth, and you are generally working with very big rasters. This all leads to a huge increase in render times. We have a few big and beefy workstations (“sizzle core beasts” as my friend Jeremy would say — we haven’t heard that expression here in some time), as well as a little render garden (6 machines < “render farm”)… but even on the shows with reasonable schedules, it’s really the arrival of online render farms and cloud computing which puts these projects within reach for small shops like mine.

On tighter schedule shows, we try to cheat and do as little in 3D as necessary and as much in comp as possible, but it really depends on the creative requirements.

Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
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