Here’s the thing about going on set, it’s like going to war. Both consist of long hours of boredom punctuated by seconds of pure terror. And just like a good soldier, a good VFX Supe should never venture onto the battlefield set without the proper equipment. For your reading and viewing pleasure, I’ve put together a Flickr set that de-constructs a well put together kit bag, piece by wonderfully useful piece. Of course everyone will have their own ideas about what their own personal must-have items are, so let the commenting begin! ITMT here’s some tips on using your bag on set.
- Remember: While it is true that you can always fix it later, you really only have one chance to shoot it right. Five minutes setting up tracking markers can save days of tracking and roto back at the ranch.
- Don’t be shy. If you see a grip or a gaffer with a new piece of gear, ask em about it. If the conversation starts to drag on too long, you can always pretend you are getting a phone call or excuse yourself for a 10-100.
- Be prepared for people to make fun of you. From the length of your tape measure to the girth of your lens, everything is fair game on set. If you can laugh at yourself and give a little gentle ribbing back in return you should be fine.
- Answer all questions that come your way. When you open up your bag of tricks and start putting all kinds of weird crap up around the set people start to think “Does this guy really know what he’s doing, or is this all a bunch of bullshit?” It’s good to let the crew know the methods behind your madness.
- And finally, you can always count on this. No matter how careful you are to watch your matte lines, no matter how hard you fight to lock off that camera, no matter how many people scream at you to get out of the shot as you struggle to place that last tracking marker… Someone back at the VFX house will tell you that they would have shot it completely different.
LINK to the Flick set that includes a full breakdown of kit items with notes
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Always act like you know what you are doing, even when flailing. Your job is usually so technical no one can tell as long as you act like it is normal operating procedure.
You really do hate the troops, don’t you?
I think tracking software likes circles or dots much more than any other shape (including triangles, squares, crosses, stars, heads of newborn babies, etc…).
A dot or a small circle will mostly keep it’s shape from frame to frame no if you rotate the camera. Other shapes won’t.
Just my 2 cents. I know everybody has an opinion on this subject…
– Xavier
The jury is out on what tracking shape is best. It can really depend on what the camera is doing. FX guide has a pretty good article exploring this topic here..
http://www.fxguide.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=212
It also really depends on weather you are doing 2d or 3d tracks. Here’s a quote from the article that sums up me feeling about 3d tracking marks nicely.
“The advantage to the triangle in the circle is that it gives you three well-spaced, high contrast corners for boujou’s automatic tracker to pick up. The crash test marker has a high contrast area in the centre, and lower contrast areas around the edge. When this marker gets small and pixelated the central region starts to give four noisy tracks instead of one stable one (the detected features get pushed away from the corners by the blurring of the image at lower scales). The triangle in the circle works much better throughout a wider range of scales.”
On the other hand, for 2d tracking you want to minimize the change in the shape of an object as the camera moves so a circle or sphere would be better in that case.
[...] prepared As you can see from my earlier kit bag post, I like to come to set prepared for anything. This also extends to doing my homework and [...]