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View Full Version : Limitations of Pan and Tile setups?

-Vormav-
04-16-2006, 10:25 AM
Okay, I absolutely love pan and tile setups. Especially when working in a package like Nuke, these give you so much more control over scenes with simple camera moves, and significantly decrease the amount of rotoscoping you need to do (and in terms of doing this on the compositing level, I guess NUKE might currently be the only area you see these?). I'm looking at shooting a few scenes, all of which will likely require rotoscoping. And also, I'm fairly certain that my 35mm SLR gives much better quality than any video camera I might be able to get my hands on. So any time I can use pan and tile, it'll save time, and give me better quality shots.

My only question regarding the use of these setups then would be, how often can you really get away with using them?
Okay, so you're limited purely to rotational camera movements; any translations create obvious parallax issues. That much is obvious. But it also seems to me that, unless you're getting a crapload of panels, there would be some very obvious problems in foreground elements. Let's say you're taking the shots just a couple feet off the ground - that ground plane would give some serious problems in the rotation, would it not? And could you get away with rotations that don't just go around the vertical axis?
Just want to get a good idea of when they work, and when they don't, before I go out and start setting up shots that can't work.
beaker
04-17-2006, 06:17 PM
All compositing packages these days have 3d cameras and can do basic pan/tile across a large plate on a 3d plane. To get parallax for a pan or a truck all you need to do is camera project that plate onto dummy low resolution geometry. That is currently limited to Nuke, DF and AE.

I have used camera projections on lowrez geometry for set extentions for many years. Previously I did it in 3d but I do it now more in the compositor (depending the shot).
-Vormav-
04-19-2006, 03:31 AM
Shake has true 3d cameras now? I know DF was supposed to get it in version 5, but I didn't know Shake was there yet. Nice to know.


I don't think projection mapping isn't really the most viable option for me though, unless I really pick cheap shots; it'd probably make things more complex than if I just filmed everything directly, rotoscoped on all of the frames, and matchmoved everything to match the scene. Some of the shots that I'm looking at will most likely have a number of trees, and things like that, so creating low rez geometry to projection map onto can be a little tricky. I could of course film a simplified scene, and then add items like trees in 3d if I decided I need them...but again, that'd be significantly more complex than if I just filmed the exact camera movements (and if I have things like trees in my scene, maybe I'll really need to do that? Not sure how well a scene with trees could really hold up, if none of it is moving).

My main question on foreground elements still stands though. It just seems like especially elements that are at sharper angles to the camera (like the ground, if the camera is at an angle that picks up a lot of the ground in front of it) wouldn't fit in with the pan very realistically - and let's assume that projection mapping is out of the question.
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04-19-2006, 03:31 AM
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