ENTERTAINMENTENGINEERING TE C H N OLOG Y | C R E AT I V IT Y | F U N
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AUTOMATION FOR KING KONG Includes motors, winches, and cable management
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FREE TRIAL OF CUBIFY SCULPT New 3D tools created at-home
Publishers/Editors:
Volume 10 Issue 9
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MOTION CAPTURE TECHNOLOGY Easily capture, adjust, and retarget motion
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THE PERFECT BURGER Color grading for food
Editorial Board:
Terry Persun | 360-379-6885 E: terry@entertainmentengineering.com Bruce Wiebusch | 440-503-3013 E: bruce@entertainmentengineering.com
Greg Hale, VP Advanced Technology Disney Parks and Resorts Kevin Russelburg, Sr. Project Engineer, ITW Pancon John Lewis, Sr. Writer, Cognex Corp.
Design & Production:
Sales
Editorial Contributors:
Vice President, Media Solutions & Sales markw@entertainmentengineering.com
Verv Creative | www.vervcreative.com Dan Cook, Ph.D.,
Program Coordinator, Entertainment Engineering and Design, UNLV
Joe Gillard, Gerald Braude, S. Korobeinik Richard Mandel, Mark Persun
Mark Wiebusch | 440-835-9733
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STAGE TECHNOLOGIES SUPPLIES AUTOMATION FOR KING KONG The King Kong musical, produced by Australia’s Global Creatures, has awed audiences in Melbourne, Australia’s Regent Theatre. The star of the show is the six-meter, one-ton King Kong puppet, designed by Global Creature Technology.
Stage Technologies teams in the UK, US, and Australia worked closely with Global Creature Technology to supply an automation system which controls the eponymous ape. The automation package includes over 12 ton of steelwork, motors, winches, and cable management systems, which give the Kong puppet its sweeping movements; enable it to lift and rotate; and allow it to travel up, down and across the stage. The on-board winches control the height and rotation of the body, and allow Kong to fly in, leap, gallop, stand, etc. Multiple lines bridle down to each King Kong shoulder, giving independent up and down movement and maneuvering Kong forwards and backwards within the space of the apparatus. In addition to the winch apparatus, two point hoists have been built into the false proscenium, which bring the ape directly to the front of the stage where he roars out at the house. Using the Sculptor toolkit (a proprietary plugin for 3ds Max), Stage Technologies worked closely with the creative team to mock up a pre-visualisation that would serve to visually communicate the puppet’s movements to the various production departments. Then, a relatively simple “baseline” plot for motion was programmed into the Acrobat desk, to which the puppeteers could add live embellishments and react in real time with the actors on the stage. The resulting ‘overlaid’ 4
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joystick control greatly simplified the plotting process, and ensured that the automation team could react to the subtle nuances of the human actors without a massive impact or the necessity of replotting during valuable technical rehearsal time. The show requires an extraordinary amount of collaboration between the entire team of Kong operators: Kings Men (manual manipulation of Kong’s arms and legs), voodoo rig operators (aka animatronic puppeteers), and the automation team who run the Stage Technologies system. In working this way the show achieves an unprecedented six degrees of motion, via the overlay of live animatronics performed by the puppeteers on top of the pre-programmed automation paths. The integration between operators is further enhanced by allowing the Voodoo rig operators to take limited control of the Stage Technologies winches and manually manipulate the pre-programmed paths which are already being run by the automation team. In this way the voodoo rig operators offset live running moves, allowing a more natural flow to the motion.
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Stage Technologies >
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Now it’s easy to add broadcast accurate waveform monitoring to your studio! Add accurate and professional rack mount waveform monitoring to your studio! SmartScope Duo includes dual independent screens so is two video and waveform monitors in one! You get seven different types of scope for measuring all aspects of a broadcast video signal including waveform, vectorscope, RGB parade, YUV parade, histogram, audio phase display, 16 channel audio level meters plus picture view! With SmartScope Duo you always get the technical accuracy broadcast engineers demand!
Broadcast Accurate You get a wide range of the most popular waveform displays available. The waveform display shows you the luminance brightness in your video, the vectorscope shows you a color plot of the various colors in your video, the RGB parade shows color balance and illegal video levels, the histogram shows the distribution of pixel brightness in your video and clipping and the audio scope lets you check audio phase and levels!
Eliminate Technical Errors Only professional waveform monitoring allows you to keep track of your video and audio quality at all times and is the only way to ensure your production meets all international standards. SmartScope Duo can be installed in racks for general technical monitoring and quality control, as well as installed into desks for use during editing, mastering and color correction. Choose your Scope! SmartScope Duo features two independent 8� LCD screens in a compact 3 rack unit size that you can instantly select between waveform, vectorscope, RGB parade, component parade, histogram, audio phase display, audio level meters or regular picture view! You can set each SmartScope Duo screen to any combination of video monitor or waveform view and change between them at any time!
Perfect SDI Video Monitoring SmartScope is also the perfect rack mount video monitor! You can use it for general rack monitoring for broadcast, post production, live production camera monitoring, on set camera monitoring, flyaway kits, broadcast trucks and much more! SmartScope Duo includes a built in Ethernet connection so allows all controls and scope settings to be changed centrally via the SmartView Utility even from a laptop!
SmartScope Duo
Learn more today at www.blackmagicdesign.com/smartscopeduo
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3D SYSTEMS LAUNCHES CUBIFY SCULPT, FREE TRIAL 3D Sculpting Tool Cubby Creates Instant Printables For At-Home Or Cloud Printing
3D Systems announced today the immediate availability of Cubby Sculpt, a powerful virtual clay delight for everyone. Cubify Sculpt, powered by 3D Systems’ volumetric CAD engine, is ideal for the freeforming of organic shapes with ready-to-print output. Cubify Sculpt comes with a 14-day free trial, is priced at $129 and available now on Cubby. Cubify Sculpt packs a powerful feature set that includes embossing with textures, adding color with paint for full color 3D printing, intuitive push and pull tools to sculpt in virtual clay and accurate symmetry settings for designing organic shapes. The mash up feature empowers users to import multiple designs to create larger and more complex objects. Cubify Sculpt designs are 3D print-ready for at-home printing or cloud printing with materials like Cubify Ceramix and Cubify Colorstone. Cubify Sculpt accepts STL, OBJ and PLY file formats. 3D Systems plans to fully integrate Cubify Sculpt into its expanding Cubify platform and to its award winning Cube and CubeX 3D printer experiences with direct plugins. “Cubify Sculpt shifts the 3D modeling tools para6
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digm, making design for instant 3D printing something everyone can do,” said Rajeev Kulkarni, Vice President & General Manager Consumer Products for 3D Systems. “Our new virtual sculpting experience sets the stage for mainstream users to create and make everyday useful and impactful printables.” 3D Systems is a provider of 3D content-to-print solutions including 3D printers, print materials and ondemand custom parts services for professionals and consumers alike. The company also provides CAD, reverse engineering and inspection software tools and consumer 3D printers, apps and services. Its expertly integrated solutions replace and complement traditional methods and reduce the time and cost of designing new products by printing real parts directly from digital input. These solutions are used to rapidly design, create, communicate, prototype or produce real parts, empowering customers to manufacture the future.
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NEVRONMOTION TRANSFORMS MOTION CAPTURE Microsoft Kinect based motion capture and retargeting system allows users to easily capture, adjust and retarget motion to 3D objects and characters The LightWave 3D® Group, a division of NewTek, Inc., recently unveiled NevronMotion™ motion capture retargeting software for LightWave 11.6 that supports the Microsoft Kinect camera. With NevronMotion, artists and animators can quickly and easily capture, adjust, and retarget motion data to 3D models inside LightWave. NevronMotion extends LightWave’s Virtual Studio Tools to allow artists to capture live rig motion with the Microsoft Kinect camera, retarget motion capture directly in LightWave Layout, save and adjust captured motion data from the Kinect camera, easily adjust arm and leg mocap positions and layer hand-keyed animation on top of motion capture files, save and load retargeting presets for FBX, BVH, or custom set ups, preset rigs for Kinect and motion capture formats, and quickly bake out motion www.entertainmentengineering.com
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to character rigs. According to a company spokesperson, “Working with motion capture files in LightWave is easy with the additional tools in NevronMotion.� Artists can quickly retarget a motion capture skeleton on LightWave characters, as well as create presets for retargeting to speed up working with custom motion capture libraries.
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Newtek Home > Lightwave Home > Lightwave NevronMotion and Video > Newtek Video >
MAKING THE PERFECT BURGER LOOK BETTER The toughest color grading work isn’t getting the right tinge around an actor battling giant insects on a meteor hurtling to Mars look real, it’s the simple things, like making bacon and cheese look good on a burger. Colorist Mark Todd Osborne had to color correct Big Boy’s recent television commercials. The Big Boy burger is as iconic as the logo of the actual Big Boy in red and white checkered pants. When people see a Big Boy television commercial, there is an expectation of seeing a perfect meal. But perfection cannot come at the price of looking unrealistic. So Mark had to walk a fine line.
WARMING UP THE EGGS, BACON AND BURGERS
“Clients in the food arena are so incredibly particular about every piece of food. It is not just about looking appetizing; the food has to also look beautiful and stunning. It is tough, exacting work, but once you have food on your reel, people know you can handle the tough assignments,” said Mark. Working freelance for Lightborne Post out of Cincinnati, which handled the production and post pro-
duction for the spots, Mark used Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci Resolve for all of the color correction. He was tasked with color correcting three national commercial spots for Big Boy, including 15 and 30 second spots for breakfast and a 30 second spot for dinner. This included color correcting images of the Big Boy double burger and all of its condiments, eggs, bacon and the kitchens they were being cooked in. “I spent a lot of time on the eggs really highlighting them. It’s all about the food. We don’t want the viewer focusing on the stainless steel knife or coffee cup. With Resolve’s tracker, I could easily track every part of the eggs and the items around them. With a couple of clicks, I got right to work on getting the color just right on the eggs,” explained Mark. Resolve’s powerful 3D tracker locks Power Windows to objects and reduces the need for extensive key generation. With this, Mark was able to track any object in a frame and create grades and effects around it. No mat-
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ter how the eggs were moved during the spot, Resolve’s Power Window kept a tight lock around them. “I threw a Power Window around the eggs and was able to focus on finding the right shading and lighting without having to worry about constantly recreating anything. Resolve allows my grades to follow the action, so I can focus on grading and not reinventing the grade with every new shot,” Mark said.
THE BIG BOY BURGER
A Big Boy is a double patty burger on a sesame seed bun with all the fixings. Changing how it looks or using color correction to make it something other than what it is would not work. The problem was that no matter how amazing a burger is in real life, food is not uniform. No grill or fry pan cooks every single inch of a burger to exactly the same color. Plus the lights, heat and other factors a piece of food suffers by being on a commercial production set cannot be seen in the final TV product. “With one burger, just a tiny piece of meat was slightly red. On a plate, it was perfect, but for a TV spot it had to be fixed. I used Resolve’s tracker to quickly brown up that one spot on the burger. The great thing is that I did this right in front of the head of the advertising agency, who had come in to approve the look of the spots. I am sure that when she suggested touching up that small brown spot, she thought she would not get to see her vision until the next day. With Resolve, I work in real time, and I made the change right in front of her,” Mark said. Beyond the burger, Mark faced the real challenges of the Big Boy spot: the lettuce and bacon. “With the bacon, some of the slices looked a bit rare for television. In reality, they were fine, but in a food spot it has to be uniform. The client wanted a nice warm tone 10
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“With one burger, just a tiny piece of meat was slightly red. On a plate, it was perfect, but for a TV spot it had to be fixed.” that looked pleasing on every part of the bacon. The challenge was doing that and keeping the look of crisp bacon intact.” This had to be done while at the same time making the lettuce stand out. And both had to remain distinct from the sharp, clean metallic look of the kitchen. “I use Resolve to create extra flair for lighting around the food. With this spot, I created special lighting specifically around the lettuce. I drew Power Windows around each item and threw on a blur or other effect quickly. I then jumped in and started to fine tune the shots,” he continued. “Resolve’s blur tool was especially useful here, since I easily created a slight blur around the Power Windows and sharpened them up, while toning down the very strong stainless steel look around them. Using keyer, I was able to isolate certain colors in any point in the shot. With Resolve’s node structure, I reused and keyed those grades in with only a couple of clicks.” With food shots, finesse and meeting tight deadlines are what is needed. And Resolve allowed Mark to get into the very fine areas quickly. It’s powerful and has a ton of little tricks that make it easy to focus on the art and not the technology.
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