Stand SL14307, NAB 2012

New Through the Lens Tracking in Previzion enables sub pixel accurate camera tracking suitable for real time set extensions.

Lightcraft Technology, a developer of real-time visual effects technology for the film and television, announced that it has just incorporated Through the Lens Tracking into its Previzion system, making Previzion the first real time VFX system capable of sub-pixel accurate real time camera tracking. With this new enhanced level of tracking accuracy the virtual cameras can be used to register and render real time set extensions for both interior and exterior locations .

Previzion is a real time visual effects system that provides high precision camera tracking, sophisticated rendering, and VFX quality keying which makes it ideal for the real time compositing of virtual backgrounds and CGI characters for on-set production. The Lightcraft Previzion system provides filmmakers with the freedom to create visual effects shots with dynamic camera moves and actually see the completed effects while shooting green screen or virtual elements. This ability enables producers to use high quality visual effects with a minimal increase in production costs and significant savings in post production.

Previzion’s Through the Lens Tracking is integrated with the standard Previzion camera tracking tools to provide additional sub-pixel accurate tracking information for any shot where optical tracking or encoded cranes can not provide a suitable level of accuracy to be used in final composites. The Previzion system automatically follows pre-measured tracking markers that are visible through the main camera lens (whether mounted directly on the set or a green screen) and merges that data with the standard optical/inertial or encoded crane tracking information.

In the past, precise registration of virtual elements and real world settings could only be achieved by doing expensive and time consuming post optical tracking. Previzion had already transformed this time consuming process by providing accurate camera position and lens information to post production optical trackers like Syntheyes or 3D Equalizer, saving hours of processing time per shot. This technique was used extensively on television series such as ‘V ‘, ‘Pan Am’, ‘Once Upon a Time’ and ‘Revenge’, but was too expensive to be used in daily telenovela production until now. With the new combination of tracking techniques, Previzion users can now achieve sub-pixel accurate tracking in real time and will be able to do complicated set extensions with the same ease and cost effective techniques that are currently being achieved with Previzion .

Additional tools were developed in Previzion in order to verify tracking accuracy and register the through the lens information with a locally surveyed coordinate framework.

“This was a much more difficult project to implement than we initially thought,” admitted Eliot Mack and Phil Mass, the co-founders of Lightcraft. “We had to take into account complex calculations involving image recognition and analysis to track multiple targets visible in the main camera viewfinder. Of course, all of this processing still had to happen with in a very tight time frame in order to maintain the real time capability of the Previzion system.”

www.lightcrafttech.com