BlueLime Studio, Inc. Architectural Rendering and Animation

High Definition Filming, Motion Tracking, Compositing for Regency Park

February 22nd, 2008 by Matt Posted in animation, motion graphics

Hello out there everyone this is Matt Espinoza from BlueLime Studio, Inc. with my first blog post; and what an exciting one it is!

We recently had a client hire us to do some very specialized work which involved shooting an area of undeveloped land via helicopter. The idea is to motion track the footage we acquire, and place a 3D modeled building where it will be built in the future. The plot of land is called Regency Park and its located up in Cary North Carolina.

Lucky for us there is a company that specializes in Aerial videography called Helivision. They have a very sophisticated camera setup mounted on a Bell 206B3 Helicopter. They use a CineFlex HD Gen3 system which utilizes the almighty Sony CineAlta HDC 1500 camera that pipes signal down to a Sony SRW1/SRPC-1 HDCAM deck. We have decided to do this piece entirely in high definition. Our weapon of choice is a format of 1280×720 60p.

They found that the optimal mounting position of the camera would be on the wing due to the types of shots we need. The lens is mounted completely separate from the camera body which is kept inside the cockpit. This orbital ball system utilizes a gyroscopic mount to eliminate vibration from the helicopter but also has a special lens dampener that allows the case to move independent from the lens to disperse movement.


The camera is controlled via a CineFlex control unit mounted inside the helicopter. Imagery is piped to three screens inside the helicopter. One for the camera operator, one for the pilot and of course, one for the director! :-P

We did some test runs inside of Google Earth Pro to iron out the best flight paths to be taken. After we were happy with the paths, we exported an overhead shot of the area into Adobe Illustrator CS3 to place color coded paths to help the pilot with his runs. I was told by the pilot that this process really helped him during the shoot.

Stay tuned as i’ll post an update once the footage is copied down from the drive and we start working on it.

-Matt

  1. 4 Responses to “High Definition Filming, Motion Tracking, Compositing for Regency Park”

  2. By jeremiah on Feb 22, 2008

    nice matt! all that helicopter needs are some wing-mounted rockets and you’re set.

  3. By chs on Feb 23, 2008

    you geek….looks like you’re enjoying yourself WWWWAAAAYYYYY toooooooooo much!!!!!nice stuff

  4. By Daniel on Feb 26, 2008

    Whoa, talk about getting high.

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