Camera Matching

After my personal research project I had a good idea of composition procedures. 

Match Moving (sometimes called Motion Tracking) is an effects technique that is required in order to match CGI elements to live-action footage.  Aspects of the live shot which must be matched are; position, scale, motion relative to live-action objects etc.  and most importantly camera movement.  In fact this is match moving primary focus, so the film camera can be reproduced in the 3D computer program, reproduced to the identical detail of the live-action camera.   There are a few match moving software packages that will track a shot using algorithms.  These programs can track motion very effectively, however match makers are still required ‘on set’ to place markers.  The reason for this, is before the computer software can calculate a 3d camera, x,y,z axis must be specified, with correct markers on the film set the software can pick these up then the compositor can manually select them as axis representations. 

 

 

 

In this image the exported camera data has been loaded into Adobe After Effects.  The left screen shows the nodes, and the right screen shows the nodes related to the real footage.  You can see that the red nodes align perfectly to the flat road surface in the footage.  Now 3d (Or even 2d) elements can be linked to any of those nodes, after being linked the element will appear aligned perfectly to the road surface. 

Here the same camera data has been imported into 3ds Max.  

  

In this image a box has been created perfectly along the same plane as the nodes (the same process as After Effects). 

 

 And finally the footage has been added to the 3ds max viewport-background, we can see the nodes aligned correctly to the road surface in the footage. 

Most importantly here the ‘camera’ view being used by 3ds max, is an accurate recreation of the film camera which shot the live footage, movement, alignment etc.  This process is key to compositing correctly.