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Special Report: NAB 2001
9th May 2001
(The original Lightwave report is here)
The most innovative product I saw was by an Israeli company called 3DV,
where they were using an infrared system mounted on a video camera to
capture Z-depth data along with video at the same time so that they could
key out the subject based on z-depth information instead of the traditional
use of blue-screen. Of course, the information could be digitized as well,
so that compositing software could use the z-depth information for depth-sensitive
effects. I don't think the resolution was quite there for film-level quality,
but I thought the idea was ingenious. They were able to key a guy out
from a busy background of displays and moving people without any trouble
at all. Imagine how that would work with a steadicam on a location unencombered
by big sheets of blue-painted wood?
RealViz caught my attention for sheer power of products. They have four
products that they were demoing: Stitcher (for making Cubic Quicktime
VRs), ReTimer (for creating film/video frames that are interpolations
of existing frames so that they can create footage that's the equivalent
of shooting with a 300 fps camera), Image Modeler (which lets you create
vertices of an object from multiple pictures of that object, from which
you then create a mesh and fully textured, animatable 3d model), and MatchMover
(motion analysis of camera path/zoom for export into 3D applications).
First, I'd like to point out that they intend to have all products running
on the Mac (OSX) by next year.
One of their demo artists commented on the number of people who had asked
him about Macintosh support. Not bad for only making up 5 of the computer
market, eh?
Second, their applications all share an incredible pixel identification
engine as they can track pixels as obscure as the line between lip and
face skin at incredible speed. Whether aligning pictures for a QT VR (which
I will use After Effects to do, since I have yet to see another program
give me that kind of control before now) or tracking 15 points in MatchMover,
their system of analyzing images is beyond Commotion's for instance.
With Stitcher, you start putting pictures into a grid and as you adjust
the pictures, the computer begins calculating what focal length your camera
was using, and the more pictures you adjust, the more accurate its calculations
until it's able to assemble the entire collection in proper perspective,
analyze the overlapping edges to make sure pixels match, and then apply
a cross fade that eliminates any seams. I'm very picky about such things,
as I said, and this program made what I do in a day happen in 15 minutes.
A truly intelligent program. It also ouputs to Pulse and Cult3D.
MatchMover is a special effects dream come true. I had the demo guy do
a bit with some hand-held video that involved a zoom, and within 10 minutes,
the 30 second clip was ready to be exported to my favorite 3D application
so that I could embed objects to my heart's content, and only have lighting
issues to deal with. The motion tracking was incredibly accurate and processed
each frame in less than a second while tracking multiple points.
When I set Commotion Pro to its highest settings I never get the same
level of accuracy they were getting, and even with Commotion taking advantage
of the G4's altivec engine, it's nowhere near as fast. MatchMover worked
so fast that you always felt you were working -- no need to take coffee
breaks while waiting for it to track a single point. Image Modeler was
like Canoma but far better. Instead of letting you just create basic geometric
shapes from a photograph or two, you could model someone's head from a
slew of photographs, and get incredible accuracy. Using it's camera analysis
and pixel-tracking capability, it could figure out where a camera was
when a picture of an object was taken. Each time a pixel in one photograph
was defined by the user, it would then identify the same pixel in other
photographs, and thus build a 3D cloud of points. From these points, a
mesh of polygons could then be created. Points and meshes could be manipulated
for greater accuracy. Then the program would map the mesh with textures
taken from the photographs that were taken at positions most normal to
the polygon being mapped. When the computer noted adjacent polygons being
mapped by a different photograph, it would blend the joining seams to
eliminate unwanted differences. At Siggraph they'll be showing an animated
woman that was modeled entirely in Image Modeler by having a lot of photographs
taken of her. I got to see the model of her head, and it was great under
OpenGL!
Obviously, none of these packages are to the point of just pressing a
button and walking out the door -- having the skills to track objects
or model are what keep these programs inline, but they certainly do open
up the horizon a little.
Finally, there was ReTimer. As I was watching the Image Modeler guy, someone
slipped him a black business card and told him to let them know about
any future products they had in development. I looked at the card and
it said "Industrial Light and Magic." I remarked to the demo guy about
that and he said that ILM had just bought 10 copies of ReTimer while there
at the show! ReTimer is the incredible software program that lets you
adjust the frame rate of existing footage through vector analysis and
frame recreation. I won't go into the demo procedure, but they could take
footage of horses running toward the camera and slow it down to 1/10th
it's normal speed, and make it look absolutely perfect -- the mane waving
in the wind, the legs working in perfect harmony, and no jitter or blur
to cover up any bad spots. I thought it looked perfect. They showed footage
of a couple of Orcas jumping out of the water at Sea World against big
BlueScreen backgrounds with water flying off their bodies in the glistening
sunlight, and water splashing as they reentered the aquarium. Then they
slowed it down to 1/10th and the water still glistened like jewels, and
the Orcas still flew -- only slower. Absolutely jaw-dropping, tongue-hanging
stuff. They could force already shot footage to vary in frame-rate to
duplicate the commercials we've all seen shot with expensive high-speed
cameras. Truly, the computer is becoming the average-income guy's best
friend (OK, maybe the average guy would have to sell his only car to afford
all this, but at least it's a choice now :)
A stop by Re:Vision's little stand, and lo and behold they have twixtor
-- an AfterEffects plug-in that does what ReTimer does without all the
controls that ReTimer has (and at 1/7th the price for the Pro version
-- around $500). I just tried their demo out on some footage of my son
when he was toddling around at 14 months, and was able to slow him down
to 1/10th speed with remarkable clarity. There was some picture crawl
when he moved his arm past a picture on his shirt, but Re:Vision is working
on yet another piece of software that eliminates video interlacing so
completely that it looks like film -- better than what I've seen Photoshop
or After Effects do, for sure. You might want to check them out at www.revisionfx.com.
I've been using their motion blur filter for over a year now to save my
butt when I don't have time to do a motion blurred render in LightWave
but want to avoid the strobed look when I export a composite for video.
They do really good work, and their plug-ins are remarkably affordable
for their performance.
A guy from Kamera Technology (Declan Caulfield) spoke at Sorenson's booth
about Quicktime. He was pretty stoked about it, claiming it was the only
streaming solution out there that had built-in interactivity. Evidently,
his group had been tasked with setting up streaming services for last
year's Olympic Games, and he used Quicktime and Sorenson's (beta) MPEG-4
compressor. He showed how he had set up Quicktime to stream sporting events
for his home country of Sweden, with Picture-in-Picture movies playing
at the bottom of the Quicktime player, a good-sized movie playing above
and to the right, and a menu (with chat capabilities) on the upper left.
He said that once viewers of the games were able to chat and watch at
the same time, average viewership went from 5 minutes to over an hour.
He also said that viewership also became community-driven as someone might
type "Oh, check out channel 3, so-and-so just fell off his horse" and
everyone would switch to channel 3 to see what was happening! And this
was with Quicktime 4! Quicktime 5 is slated not only for MPEG-4, but Apple
(as I'm sure you know) has also promised MPEG-2 support as well. My only
complaint is that they don't make it more obvious to use all it's capabilities.
However, I do think they're on the right track, because MPEG-4 is more
than just about video compression -- it even supports 3D and picture formats
to a worldwide standard of visual communication by the MPEG committee.
Finally, I had to visit the Electric Image booth. Alex Lindsey (they guy
who surfaced the queen's ship in Star Wars Episode 1 and who also modelled
and animated all the ice crystals in Titan AE) was demoing Universe there.
He also is the founder of www.dvgarage.com
which I like to frequent for his insight. He was promoting Universe's
layered rendering system, and I was amazed at the level of detail he'd
go into. It wasn't enough to just generate a map for each surface type.
He'd generate multiple maps for specularity and reflection, for instance.
One with a broad reach across objects, and a second with a more confined
and more pronounced effect. All these layers were then tamed with grunge
maps, and combined to create a level of realism that would sink Bill Flemming
:) (OK, I've never read his photoreal book, but a little dig at the guy
who conned a Serious 3D subscription from me is in order.)
I'm always amazed by guys who've reached the top (ie. working at ILM,
or doing work that makes it into serious-budget movies) and manage to
be personable and friendly. We also talked briefly about his undertaking
to train Africans in various nations on 3D modelling, starting with Amorphium
Pro, in an effort to help them skip the industrial revolution right into
the current computer age. They are rich in artistic heritage, and he doesn't
see the point in continuing to give third-world countries our hand-me-down
trades when we can all benefit by giving them more. I liked that guy.
I did sit in on two After Effects presentations at NAB as well (partly
motivated at catching a flying T-Shirt, but intrigued by the demonstration
nonetheless). It is a significant upgrade, as there is now a switch for
turning a layer into a 3D enabled layer. You get to add lights with adjustable
properties, and camera(s) with adjustable properties, and your 3D-enabled
layers suddenly gain some Lightwave-like properties (diffusion, specularity,
shadow-casting on or off, shadow-receiving on or off, etc.) By adding,
say, 10 layers of video, each one can be made to fly past the camera in
3D space at different distances and speeds to create a cool effect that
previously could only be done in a 3D application by mapping video (or,
worse, video converted to stillframe sequences) to flat polygons that
were then flown past a camera).
Then, just when you thought that was good enough for an upgrade, the demo-artist
breaks through your imagination by using the phrase "point-and-shoot."
Any Mac-head knows "point-and-click" and "plug-and-play" as affection-laden
phrases, used the first day we touched our Macs. But "point-and-shoot"
is to LW's expressions what elegance is to bare-knuckled survival :) With
"point-and-shoot" you can simply draw a line from one layer to another
to create a parent-child relationship. Or, you can enable a layer to support
expressions (basically, javascript), and then "point-and-shoot" to any
properties on any other layer that you want your expressions to be based
on.
As an example, the demo-artist typed out the word "IMAGINE" (one letter
per layer), and then spun the letter "G" around once. He then attached
expressions that were dependent on the G's rotation to the other letters.
The other letters then spun around a vertical axis (centered on the center
of the screen) in different speeds and directions with only two keyframes
in the entire composition -- the start and end keyframes for the letter
"G"s rotation. He then raised the camera on the y-axis, rotated it down
to look at the spinning letters, gave each letter a random starting point,
and then had the camera drop into it's final position as all the letters
swirled around to finally spell the word "IMAGINE" as the camera settled.
Another demonstration was just on the parent-child relationships that
could be set up. Using Illustrator artwork that had been shaded with a
nice 3D feel, (3 being organic-metal arms, the 4th, an organic-metal video
monitor), he was able to parent each layer to the one below it, and then
rotate the objects (after adjusting their pivot points) to give a cool
animation of a multi-jointed mechanical arm retracting a spinning metallic
monitor. By making adjustments to the simulated shutter-angle (from the
default 180 degrees to 720), he was able to introduce beautiful motion
blur despite the relatively slow motion of the animation. It looked like
lots of fun.
Well, that about sums up my highlights. I did visit other booths that
were offering streaming video services on the PC platform, digging for
someone who could stream and offer interactivity (using email doesn't
count with me). Pinnacle had a $20,000 broadcasting package that would
let you stream video and Powerpoint pictures side-by-side. I had to chuckle
when I saw a Cleaner 5 demo taking place in the Microsoft Partners pavillion.
In the upper left corner of the screen was a tell-tale Apple logo. In
a previous demonstration there, somebody had been trying to demo Premiere
and couldn't get the sound to work and it didn't have any Apple logo in
the upper left corner either. Evidently, a computer had to be swapped
out to keep the Microsoft Partners crowd impressed :) I'll bet they never
noticed the difference . . .
Apple's presence there was outstanding, too. Crowds were watching the
FinalCut Pro demos and DVD Studio Pro demos. They must have had 40 G4's
demoing everything from Maya and Discreet stuff to Quicktime's media skins
and just plain old OS X -- I guess it'll be at least another year before
Apple dies:).
I still can't believe Meni, the Man of Lightwave, is planning on jumping
to OS X soon. I didn't realize it, but he was working at Station X when
Fori and them were designing project:Messiah, as he had a large part in
helping them design its functionality. His interest in OS X is very telling.
Good days are ahead, my friend. As if you didn't know:) (Thanks Anon!).
27th April 2001
I received this fascinating anonymous report on NAB:
" First, it was very cool meeting Brad Peebler and Meni. Meni has
got to be the Tiger Woods of Lightwave -- very easy to talk to and relate
to while holding you in awe because of his superb skills. They both demonstrated
(on the side) the two biggest upgrades to the 6.5 b patch -- one being
the noise smoothing function which smoothes out noise from both radiosity
and area light renders (and we're not talking a blur filter here, either,
as everything stays sharp).
The other is the improved operation of bones, where the falloff can be
set to the 64th power now. Meni is working on an animated short (The Creep,
which he'll be posting the trailer for on his website once he gets the
time), and all the animation of his little character was being done without
the use of weight maps. There was still some subtle bleeding over of mesh
influence from the bones on things like fingers, but he expected it to
be completely eliminated by the time the patch was released. As a result
of the reduced influence of the bones, the IK should calculate a lot faster
as well!
He also talked about this patch being optimised for the P III and P IV,
but I didn't catch the exact number. There's a link from Flay's website
to Safe Harbor where they're claiming a 100% jump in performance with
the P IV, and if they're right then it's time I started freshening up
on sign language!
I will tell you this -- I get to compare a dual 500 G4 against an Athlon
900 at work, and I've found that for radiosity or area light intense scenes,
the duall 500 is 1.3 times faster, even though its combined chip speed
is only 1.1 times greater.
Tonight, while setting up another render, the dual 500 was rendering in
17 seconds what the 900 MHz Athlon was taking 44 seconds to render (which
shocked me, making me double check the settings, and do an image to image
comparison to make sure I hadn't missed something). So I think the G4
can hold its own, assuming you ignore cost of machine of course :)
Back to Meni's on-the-side demos, he was showing a scene from his upcoming
short of an overturned garbage can on a concrete surface in a grungy part
of town that he'd rendered with radiosity and noise smoothing.
However, the radiosity-rendered scene had been baked onto the objects
in the scene so that you could view the scene with photoreal textures
in opengl and get incredibly fast render times from it. When I first saw
the renders, they looked like real photographs mapped onto his objects.
By selecting what aspects of a surface got baked, he was able to bake
in the lighting characterstics he wanted, while letting shadows, reflections,
and specularity still respond to a changing environment.
He and Brad both commented on how the baking of surfaces, originally intended
for gamers, has become a very valuable tool for creating realistic environments
that render very quickly. They also talked about the next patch being
made available in about three more weeks.
I don't know if that should be repeated, but I think just fixing the bones
is worth that wait. Meni said that Alan Hastings had recently informed
Brad that he had found an anomoly in his bones formula which he is in
the process of correcting -- possibly eliminating all unwanted bone influence
for good. Then weight maps can be used as organizational tools instead
of being used to prevent unwanted influence in an object's mesh on a bone
by bone basis!
This is going to be a good year, indeed! Just thought you'd like to hear
this news." (Thanks Anon.)
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