Watching the PSP Live Webcast...

[vijil]

With high def high fps cameras and a little on the fly post processing you could make paint streams visible. It would be tricky and probably too expensive to set up live at the moment.

That reminds of my biggest gripe- I always thought they should put a couple seconds delay on the camera feeds so that we see what happened just before the live editor cut to the current camera. I.e. the feed and sounds is delayed but not the editing. Would stop us missing action on the other side of the field too much. Or were they doing that this event?

[pbjosh]

vijil: We had talked about that on here previoously.

The new RED 4K cameras, a specific paint color and some Matlab processing and it could be done. When I get the gun rolling we might try it out...

[vijil]

Sounds good. I'm not familiar with matlab, but in after effects it would be a fairly simple case of highlighting and motion blurring the color as I'm sure you've thought of. I wonder whether 4k would be enough for a top down view though.

[pbjosh]

Yep - tracking could be setup to track only items moving a certain frame rate also, so stationary paint wouldn't register.

Maybe a few top down guns? Plus setting the field cameras to shoot firing lanes, and postioning the cameras based on that? Having a ton of cameras wouldn't hurt either. Been far to busy to catch the live streaming though... so I haven't seen the latest coverage. Haven't had a day off in 14 days... and only 2 in the last 3-4 weeks.

[L x]

A far simpler idea would just be to put little IR(or something) lasers on all players barrels. So that if the production team wants to, they can hit a button and you would see any normal camera view with the lanes (lasers) overlayed ontop.

[vijil]

That would have issues during daylight hours, and you'd need super powerful lasers for the beam itself to reflect off the air particles enough to be visible to a camera. At night it might work.

Another option which will probably become feasible sooner or later is to have every gun track it's position, orientation and firing state including reloads all through the game. This info could be relayed back and used for real time 3D digital overlays and lane markers etc.

By the time that happens there wont be much point using actual paint any more - might as well just go full Augmented Reality. Maybe shock vests so you feel the hits

For now I think high res cameras + matlab is the most feasible option. Should try it with some of your footage L x (seriously send me some and I'll do a demo)

[L x]

Do you want over-shoulder stuff? You're welcome to just keepvid.com anything from my videos such as



There's a variety of stuff there at 100% speed (30fps) and some at 50% speed (60fps), could try it on both. The raw footage is like 500-1000mb per short clip so not really feasible to send around.

Would be really keen to see what y'all can come up with.

[vijil]

hmm. Will give it a shot. Methinks the balls might be moving too fast to do much with automagically but I'll see what I can do.

[edit] yeah, colour keying it wont work without lots of manual roto. I really need a way to do a combined motion and colour key but will need moar plugins...

[fullofpaint]

A friend and I messed around with this a bit last year, when we had access to an Epic. It worked...but like you said, we (well he, he's the AE guy, I'm the camera guy) had to roto, every couple balls, and work it like that. I don't think you could really do it until 8K becomes viable, or at least a 4K image sampled from 8K from the F65. I'll have to see if I have any of the footage lying around. Just us messing around in the yard, no actual games unfortunately.

[pbjosh]

Here is one of the bits I found - looked like you could track out the non motion fairly easy...

http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~flw/tracker/