Hi Garry,
Interesting tutorial, I've been looking at Icarus too. However I'm still in
doubt about another solution as I'm not satisfied about the results I got.
Maybe I made some mistakes, I don't know.
Hi Arjo :
Yes , Icarus can be hard to use and in fact , I could not
do the Voodoo .TGA image sequence example , with Icarus alone!
I had no luck with Icarus's attempt to guess at what the Focal
Length of the camera was , so turned to Voodoo to find out .
This is the flaw in Icarus . Fine for some video , but no good
for others . That is why I strongly suggest using Voodoo to
determine what the Focal length is (unless you already know
the Focal Length) and use Icarus to match that Camera .
Actually I'm thinking about buying Syntheyes. This was the cheepest
commercial software I could find (with Realsoft export). I tried the demo
and I got rock solid result with one push of the button.
Yes , as I mention in the Tutorial , SynthEyes looks very
good from the demo and the example script that is available
for download . It will be my next S/W purchase , I think .
At last, I've got some questions about your tutorial:
Why did you leave out the first step mentioned by the user guide?
I mean: is the destortion correction done by the distortion module not
needed?
I would say that usually it is not needed , unless you are
building something that will really show "a lack of distortion" .
For instance , say you are placing a long billboard into a
video with a long or high fence . The fence will be distorted a
little , but your RS3D billboard will not be . Then you must
decide if you want to remove the video's distortion with Icarus .
It will also depend on what kind of lens was used to shoot
the video . As you know , wide-angle lens's will distort more .
Icarus seems to do a good job with this Module, depending on how
accurately you can place your "input line" onto your video .
Why did you skip the calibration step?
We skipped the Camera Calibration step in Icarus , simply because
we did that step in Voodoo , first . Voodoo's "Track" includes the
calibration step in one single button . We typed the Voodoo calibration
info that we needed , into Icarus , to avoid Icarus's weak spot .
Did you skip the orientation step on purpose? I couldn't
get a good result with that option.
Arjo.
Yes , it was the Achilles heal of Icarus , in my opinion .
Many of my tests proved Icarus to be completely useless when
used alone on a lot of video's , thus , the tutorial's birth .
The problem is that Icarus asks the user to manually draw
onto a 2D image ,where the X-Y-Z planes are ! This is OK for
the Icarus building example (in the Docs) , but try that with
an average video scene . You could be out just a single pixel
or 2 and it will change the calibration completely !
Then , Icarus will ask you "is this the correct Focal
Length? " . How should I know ? Sometimes Icarus will tell
you that the Camera cannot be calculated , even though you
did your best to draw the 3 axis . Now what ? It's a joke .
The only solution is to use Voodoo first . (or restrict
your video's to shots with nice big sharp cubes in them) .
Voodoo is a much more advanced S/W , as the current crop of
camera-matching S/W's are now .
Thanks for your questions Arjo , and I hope you do decide
to buy SynthEyes instead . It looks like a good price and
an excellent alternative to my humble freeware workaround
tutorial . For those that just want to try placing an RS3D
object into their video's , hopefully this tutorial will
allow them to experiment a little first .
studio
Hi :
http://studiodynamics.net/cam_match/camera_matching.html
Thought I would share this information , since it may
be usefull to someone .
There are several links in the tute' including a link
to the final RS3D project file .
The resulting animation is below , and is not much to look
at but gives an idea of what we are trying to acomplish .
http://tinyurl.com/2bf9cv 200KB Xvid
It's a long 'one page' tutorial since it is written for
beginners . For most intermediate or advanced users , only
the series of steps in the middle are required to arrive at
the camera-data , and then the part about getting the data
into RS3D can save you some time .
Let me know if I missed anything . Thanks .
studio
--
No virus found in this incoming message.
Checked by AVG Free Edition.
Version: 7.1.410 / Virus Database: 268.17.14/658 - Release Date: 1/29/2007
