Machine Vision

 

Giant Studios uses the eXcite in a motion capturing application

The center of a hundred square meter motion picture studio stage glistens with illumination. A half dozen people are slowly moving around the stage. Their clothes all look similar, but not from this century. It seems as though small points of light are dancing in the same rhythm as the movements of the people on the stage. Abruptly, this subdued scenario changes and the actors are fighting with each other. After a few seconds, a loud “thank you” resounds and everyone immediately relaxes. We are guests at a facility of Giant Studios located in Los Angeles, California in the USA.

One of the main focuses of Giant Studios is “motion capturing” technology. Vaughn Cato, one Giant’s technical experts, explains that the requirements for special effects in today’s movie productions are increasing rapidly. In many cases, it is impossible to capture these action sequences in the real world, or it would be much too expensive and dangerous. In these situations, a safe alternative is animation. Over the last few years, Giant Studios has developed new technology for capturing motion and insuring the realistic movement of animated actors. As a first step, real actors are equipped with a unique set of reflectors positioned at their main joints. The stage is illuminated by a special type of lighting, and a setup of multiple cameras captures the scenario from different angles. On the fly, software separates and determines the position of the visible reflections in each captured image. In an offline step, the actual 3D position of each reflection is calculated. The results are movement cues in space and time for the actor’s joints. The replacement of these animated “skeletons” with either fictive or realistic bodies is the last step to a making an exciting movie.

In the past, simultaneous image capturing at high speed required a collection of hardware including cameras, frame grabbers, PCs, and network connections. For their current generation of movie making technology, Giant Studios decided to use Basler’s intelligent eXcite cameras for the image capture and pre-processing task. According to Giant’s Cato: “The current setup with almost 100 cameras is much more straightforward than in the past. Each eXcite calculates and transfers a list of positions for each captured image via the integrated GigE interface to a central server. So we can dramatically decrease the number of required components while increasing the performance, the stability and quality, and the service friendliness. Services are simply performed via remote access to the eXcite cameras.”

The success of Giant’s new concepts resulted in top performing movies such as The Lord of the Rings, X-Men, and Happy Feet, just to name a few.

You can be sure that Basler’s eXcite will have a leading role the next time the word “action” echoes through the studio.