[Tamanegi65]

Hmm, tracking to a zoom is crucial for us – I always ask too – but often get overridden by the director or just from the requirements of the shot, seems they are always zooming the lens.

By tracking to a 3D model – my understanding is that in boujou4 (and the latest pftrack) you can bring in a 3D model of your scene and make correspondences between tracked features and points on the 3D model. Is this not true? Maybe I’m misreading the marketting-ease on the sites?

[Tamanegi65]

Thanks to everyone for your replies – very useful.

CG: Was wondering why you suggest also getting SynthEyes? Do you feel that in cases where PFTrack is having problems SynthEyes might do better?

MYLENIUM’s comment about PFTrack’s speed is a big concern. If I have to buy extra licenses for PFtrack and tie up multiple machines – then thats going to be more of a pain then just spending the extra money for Boujou.

Anyone else have any experience with PFTrack’s speed vs. Boujou?

MIKE: What are the main features missing in Bullet? Tracking to 3D geometry isn’t there – this sounds like a great feature as I always take detailed measurements on set usually end up making a 3D model of the set anyway for reference – if I could use that model to help a track that would be awesome. What else?

[Tamanegi65]

For me I don’t want any automated process to mess with my colors – It can be a pain at times, but I’d rather tweak them myself. You basically have 3 options to fix a non-broadcast safe color: reduce saturation, reduce luminance, shift the hue. Each of these has a totally different look (esp w/ reds and yellows.) Sometimes I do a combination of all three using a hue/sat filter to get a color I’m still happy with, but is now broadcast safe.

This could be on an adjustment layer – but it shouldn’t mess with your alpha? You can also only change specific colors in hue/sat to only make adjustments where really needed. Other times I just put a filter on every individual layer that is causing bad colors and fix them one by one.

[Tamanegi65]

Check your ram cache settings – make sure its not set to only use a small portion of ram.

That said – I’ve always had problems with AE memory management – I tell it to use 80% of ram (2G), yet sometimes it only ram caches a small portion of the project with lots of ram still free. Its also unpredictable when it starts using disk cache – sometimes a ram preview will stop w/o ever disk caching anything, even though I have it turned on. This is all on a PC – not sure if mac has same problems.

Hopefully this is better in 7 – what version you on?

[Tamanegi65]

I always just use ctrl-C to copy, and once I’m in text edit mode in AE hit ctrl-V to paste.

BUT – I’ve had problems – it works for awhile, but then when I paste I get the old paste buffer, not what I just copied.

It seems to be related to WORD – when I copy from NOTEPAD it seems to work better.

Could be an AE thing – but its probably more a windows bug, who knows….

[Tamanegi65]

Just a note to add to the thread to clarify.

AE doesnt’ do anything by default for broadcast safe colors. I usually use the video broadcast filter set to ‘key out unsafe’ to see where I have problems, but use hue/sat to correct them.

[Tamanegi65]

Yes, true – we’ll get the telecined footage either as an uncompressed mov or a tga sequence – should be nice to work with.

So is the general concensus that the type of paint isn’t really that important?

[Tamanegi65]

DVCPROHD is 4:2:2. We haven’t done a shoot yet where we bypass the tape transport and record direct to hard drive – but we might do that for a few key shots in an upcoming film, then I believe we’ll have 4:4:4.

[Tamanegi65]

Thanks for all the info – unfortunately we need to keep the cyc in focus as it will also have tracking markers for matchmoving. 🙂

[Tamanegi65]

Thanks for your comment. Most our shoots are green on HD (usually VariCam) – I’ve been experimenting with not lighting the green so hot (but still even) – also because of the chroma fringing I get when the talent has dark clothes – the bright green to dark contrast edge seems to cause DVCPROHD to cause purple banding.

Anyway – my understanding is the Chroma Key blue paint is not as bright as Ultimatte blue paint – so to not have the cyc too bright do you think it would be better to go with Chroma Key blue?