Talk:Performance capture

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

	This article is within the scope of Wikipedia:WikiProject Filmmaking, an attempt to better organize information in articles related to filmmaking. If you would like to participate, you can edit the article attached to this page, or visit the project page, where you can join the project and/or contribute to the discussion.
B	This article has been rated as B-Class on the assessment scale.

The first line sounds like the marketing department wrote it.

I've reverted to "hobo" because the character isn't simply a generic "homeless man". He is a hobo: living on his own, "riding the rails" on the sly, fixing his dinners over a campfire, etc. It's how the character is identified in the credits. "Hobo" is a culturally and historically appropriate term, and it describes the character more correctly than "homeless man" does.

The paragraph about active motion capture reads like and ad.

I believe Final Fantasy "Spirits Within" holds the distinction of the first fully motion capture feature and not Polar Express. Both have motion capture and some animation thrown in on the top, but Final Fantasy beats it by a few years.

7/22/06: The Final Fantasy movie wasn't done with performance capture. The idea behind performance capture (and how it differs from traditional motion capture) is the fact, that first, the performance of the actors is captured to a computer (and possibly composited together, if all the actors in a scene weren't captured simultaneously). This is basically just traditional mocap. The difference comes after: In performance capture, the cinematography is done with a "virtual camera" that the cinematographer (or director, in Robert Zemeckis's case) moves around. The scene is rendered live and shown on the camera's viewfinder and the movement of the camera is captured as well, so it's possible to get more lifelike handheld camera movements, than it would be, if the movements were animated on a computer. No if only someone could make this apparent in the article.

And I agree, all the stuff about Imagemetrics and Phasespace read like an ad. Apparently someone from their marketing departments thought it would be a good idea to put a little marketing hype on wikipedia.

To me the difference between motion capture and performance catpure is that motion capture deals with just capturing a motion, which could be a crash test dummy in a car, or a footballer throwing a ball, or a kid walking across a room that has force plates in the floor. But performace cature deals with capturing an actors performance and in addition deals with part of the process of delivering that performance to the screen (capture, cleanup, retargetting, editing, placement). I think one of the first characters to really illustrate this was the relationship between andy serkis and gollum. Any any point of the production if there was any question as to what gollums performance was to be, the usual answer would be found by "looking at the andy reference". This reference may be filmed footage or motion capture data. The performance of andy was key towards the creation of gollum, and this to me is an illustraion of "performance capture". Zemekis and sony imageworks have taken "Performance Capture" on in a big way, but they by no means invented it. I would agree that final fantasy was the first film to use motion capture in a big way, but it would be wrong to say "fully motion capture" as there is always an editing process an animation augmented to the mocap. An example of making a movie without using performance capture would be to mocap 10 different people for the lead role, and let the animator or motion editor re-edit the performance to remove the unique subtleties that each actor brings and insert their own. I hope this illustrates my view of the difference between motion capture and performance capture. This article is full of application specific examples that has obviously been written by a vendor or someone close to a vendor. It also seems to use terms "Performance Capture" and "Motion Capture" interchangably. There is a lot of content that belongs under "Motion Capture", but there is some valid content that talks about "performance capture". Do Sony Imageworks or Zemekis have a trakemark on the name "Performance Capture", I thought I read that somewhere a while ago. Peeldog 00:24, 5 September 2006 (UTC)