I was reading the most recent issue of the excellent American Cinematographer magazine and they were explaining the techniques and camera systems used in the new Dan Brown film Angels & Demons. Disregarding the undoubtedly poor quality of the film made from admittedly not very good source material, the techniques are still valuable.
The film required a limited amount of location work as the Vatican were unsurprisingly not very accommodating to a Dan Brown film, something low budget indie film makers are used to. This pushed the team into doing a large amount of digital matte shots and as such needed to track a lot of substitute locations.
As anyone who has done match move/camera tracking using features will know getting good track points from mids and close ups is a massive problem and a significant amount manual tracking has to be done to try and fix it. The solution the hollywood guys came up with was surprisingly cost effective and simple to implement.
They bought a couple of HD harddrive miniature camcorders to do the tracking and mounted on the main camera. A HD camcorder can be picked up for a few hundred pounds these days and it’s quite possible to find one you can borrow. This is then mounted onto the main high quality camera, in my case an EX1 using a cold shoe mount adapter.
The camcorder is kept at a wide angle so a large amount of scene features to track on are kept in frame all the time and the camera can also be set on a high shutter speed to reduce motion blur. Motion blur is a huge problem in pixel based tracking systems like After Effects, more advanced tracking systems like Mocha are less susceptible to it but can still lose accuracy. Having a high shutter speed on your main camera is generally not possible due to the sterility and jarring it gives to movement, an aesthetic choice you don’t want dictated by technological limitations. The video from the camcorder can easily be synced up with the main camera using the normal clapper slate you’d use to sync sound.
The track may need some adjustment for close shots due to the slight difference in point of view of the tracking camera and it won’t automatically handle a zoom on the main camera (should be easy to do a manual adjustment on this if you really need it). But unless you want to start getting into motion control rigs it’s an exceptionally good and affordable solution to a perennial problem.
A shoe mount can be picked up from Camera grip for not a lot of money and if you can’t borrow one a full HD camcorder can be picked up for less than £400.
Good luck and happy tracking, send me an email with your success stories and the pitfalls you encounter. Simon Hargreaves
