DailyDirt: You Can't Believe Everything You See
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
We’ve mentioned some interesting CGI work before, but the field of advanced video processing just continues to be amazing. Big Hollywood budgets won’t be necessary if CGI software keeps getting better and better. Here are some cool clips we’ve seen.
- Fix your shaky home movies with some image stabilization software. A nice benefit from military research to make your kid’s first birthday videos watchable without Dramamine. [url]
- Being John Malkovich could be a lot easier than crawling down some dark tunnel. Malkovich, Malkovich, Malkovich…. [url]
- Disney and Carnegie Mellon researchers are working on software to make animated faces look more realistic. And actors will eventually need to be Andy Serkis. [url]
- This HDR video system merges three simultaneous images to obtain some really cool-looking shots. The software that creates these videos lets the director choose some nice lighting effects. [url]
- To discover more tech-related content, check out what’s currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]
By the way, StumbleUpon can recommend some good Techdirt articles, too.
Filed Under: animation, cgi, hdr, john malkovich, siggraph, video
Companies: disney, vreveal
Comments on “DailyDirt: You Can't Believe Everything You See”
Virtualdub already can do that too.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCoaJDIrmCM
And so is another tone of software out there.
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=libmv+image+stabilization
Are those results better than the others somehow?
For HDR photography there is actually something good and open source called Hugin.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55TRvfy_eUk
The face recognition things are cool though. Even though some people have been tinkering with that stuff using the kinect, but they are crude in comparison.
http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=3d+face+mapping+using+kinect
Disney and Carnegie Mellon researchers are working on software to make animated faces look more realistic. And actors will eventually need to be Andy Serkis.
Out of all the CGI movies I’ve seen, I think the Shrek movies had the best facial animations. I could easily tell the mood of a character by their faces. The faces of characters in other animated films look fairly wooden in comparison. Of course the Shrek characters weren’t exactly realistic, but I don’t see why they can’t apply the same techniques to more realistic character models.
For body movements, I think that the Starship Troopers TV show had the best animation. The first time I ever saw the show, without knowing anything about it, they were showing several characters moving around in space suits. I actually thought they were live actors until it showed their faces.
Re: Re:
I seriously think that CGI will get to the point where actors will basically be “voice actors” — and their physical appearance will be almost always modified by graphic artists (like most magazine covers nowadays)….
Shakycam is how you know it is real!
And thanks to the Shakycam(TM) patent pending software, you’re now steady footage can look just like the Hollywood movies!