Astronauts - CBS Television

Beating the motion control bottleneck.

Motion control is great for those 'rivet-scraper' shots, says Craig Weiss, referring to the super-close-ups of spaceship models in CBSTV's work on the upcoming Astronauts. 'But processing the camera data to use in the composite takes a long, long time, and we were in a hurry.'

VFX Supervisor Weiss and the team at CBS Animation were called in to create scenes showing the orbiting space station and shuttle docking manoeuvres and chose motion control to give precise manipulation of camera movement focus and exposure in repeated passes. Three weeks of pre-vis work had given exact timings to each of the shots, which Weiss felt could best be reproduced with the computer-controlled camera.

'We'd created a pipeline for a previous project involving a motion control rig and we knew how much massaging of the camera data was involved,' Weiss added. 'That was something we definitely wanted to avoid on the schedule we had for Astronauts.' Instead, Weiss discarded the data from the rig and turned to boujou to recreate the camera data directly from the shots. Tracking a combination of live action and blue screen in the shot, boujou accurately recreated the nuances of the computer-controlled moves and delivered in a fraction of the time.

'With the conventional way of processing motion control data, it was taking us one or two days for each shot,' Weiss explained, 'but with boujou we were nailing them in 45 minutes. Tracking everything with boujou was pretty straightforward - it was just punch and go. We got accurate results immediately.'