Game Day - A special time lapse 3D presentation

Welcome everyone,

For a kick start of the Waves & Pixels blog, I am publishing "Game Day - At Nokia Arena, home of Maccabi Electra Tel Aviv".
This video is special time lapse 3D presentation depicting a full game day at Nokia Arena, Tel Aviv. Camera mapping technique helped achieve otherwise virtually impossible camera moves that you don't usually see within a time lapse shot. I created this video as part of a location research project for my studies, and I hope you enjoy it.



A little behind the scenes information:
The footage was captured with a Logitech Quickcam Pro 9000. Yes, this is a webcam (!) but it provides high definition resolution. I got the inspiration for this off a tutorial on Digital Urban (link). Since the image quality was not that of a professional camera, a lot of post-production work was needed to bring the footage to a reasonable level. This was made partly with VirtualDub but mostly with Blender utilizing the composition nodes.



On the left is an original frame. On the right is the same frame after retouching - rotation, sharpening, color adjustments (especially on the top right corner) and many other filters.

Most of the production was done with Blender. Following are some screen shots from the various work stages within it. First can see the node structure of some of the frame retouching. The clock was powered by a python script and rendered separately with an alpha channel and then laid over the finished animation.



For the camera mapping technique, I used Colin Levy's wonderful tutorial (link). What was so special about this camera mapping project is that I mapped a video instead of a still photo. After I modeled the scene through the view of the camera I could then animate it's moves. Since camera mapping is very sensitive to scene edges, I also had to animate the camera's lens and frame shift. Had I not done this, you could sometimes observe completely ridiculous effects like for example part of the ground in the sky.













Finally, I used the Blender internal sequence editor to add titles and audio. My friend Sahar Radomsky helped me with the soundtrack, and then all work was done.













I hope you've enjoyed watching this project as much as I have enjoyed creating it. Feel free to use the comments section to let me know what you think!

3 comments:

Colin Levy said...

Nicely done, Ariel!

--Colin

LightningIsMyName said...

Wow!

This is one of the best post-editing of videos that I have seen, and it's definetly THE best camera mapping I have seen.
I tried it once but I didn't have the time or skill to do it... This probbably took years :D

The python script for making a clock is annoying - I also had to write such a script for a video I made (too bad there is no such feature built in).

Glad to see another Israeli blender user =)
I'll watch your blog since it looks interesting ;)

Benjy Cook (benjycook@hotmail.com) said...

Great work.
Also another Israeli congratulating you on the BNation mention.

Good luck with the blog,
Benjy

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