Office Hours 2024-08-19

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[00:00:00] Eliot: Hey, good morning. 

[00:00:09] Micaiah: Morning. How you doing? 

[00:00:10] Eliot: Good. Good. So I think we have an a lead on what might be going. It was a great. So there's a pathing question. So let's take a look. Uh, you want to share a screen again and I want to check the, how it's scanning and we're going to put a, we're gonna put a warning in, in auto shot just so it can catch that a little bit better.

[00:00:28] Eliot: Yeah. Let's see where we're at, where we're at. Okay. So let's see. Um, all right. So I'll tell you what, can I drive for a second? Yeah, feel free. All right. How do I do that?

[00:00:45] Eliot: Let me see if I can help you on this. There's some like button there. That's more. They changed the UI. Where did that go to? [00:01:00] Uh, Oh, okay. Wait. No, that's not it. 

[00:01:06] Micaiah: I know we figured this out last 

[00:01:08] Eliot: time. 

[00:01:08] Micaiah: I know. 

[00:01:09] Eliot: I know. It's like, where'd that go?

[00:01:16] Eliot: Let's see what we have here. Hey, there it is. It's under. All right, let's see if this works. Okay, so let's see. So let me clear. Okay, so let me clear this. There we go. Okay, so I want to check our CineSource. Okay, so you switch it to desktop. Oh, I have to click and drag on that now. That's right. Okay. Okay, so there is the two files.

[00:01:42] Eliot: There we go. So what happens when we scan? It's looking.

[00:01:52] Eliot: Oh wait, there it is. There's the problem. Let's see. So let me just try shift scan. Scanning videos.[00:02:00] 

[00:02:02] Eliot: All right,

[00:02:28] Eliot: so D2, that's a good sign.

[00:02:56] Eliot: All right, that's good. Five matching CineMatch. [00:03:00] Okay, and

[00:03:04] Eliot: Okay, that's all seems fine. Let's regenerate our frames. And we're going to Oh! Oh, okay. That might be it. Okay. I wonder if it's the project folder. Let's try this.

[00:03:32] Eliot: It's promising. There we go. It's in

[00:03:47] Eliot: ModNet, that's good.[00:04:00] 

[00:04:03] Eliot: Okay. So it extract the frames. That's good. Oh my God. It looks like it's working. I had it where we were before. 

[00:04:09] Micaiah: Have you done anything different with it? 

[00:04:11] Eliot: so what I did is, is, uh, there's, uh, I told it to, uh, just rescan that directory and, and by clicking shift scan and then, uh, then it, then it kind of goes from scratch and that, that would be a, I should probably put that somewhere in the tutorial on that.

[00:04:29] Eliot: All right. Let's see what we got here.

[00:04:36] Eliot: All right. That's good. Looks like it's running Blender.

[00:04:52] Eliot: It's thinking. It[00:05:00] 

[00:05:05] Micaiah: looks like it's opening up something right here. All right. 

[00:05:09] Eliot: And let's pop up the Blender screen if that shows up and you can share that one. You see this? Actually, no. I still see his autoshot, so he probably shared on a per window basis and I can turn off my control. I don't need it. How about that? All right.

[00:05:27] Eliot: So that looks promising. Let's see. Okay. And. There we go. That's a try. Hey, there we go. It looks there. We go. There's track data. Yay. Okay. So while we're here, let's, uh, let's go into SynthEyes. So verify everything is, is running, uh, running through, 

[00:05:44] Micaiah: should I rerun it or 

[00:05:46] Eliot: I just click on from program to others?

[00:05:51] Eliot: Uh, yeah, but from Blender to others,

[00:05:59] Eliot: [00:06:00] there we go. Yep. And then just click save and run.

[00:06:08] Eliot: There we go. So it's going to make all those. Okay. So then go ahead and just click on the SynthEyes script exported too. Cause we want that finder directory. 

[00:06:18] Micaiah: Perfect. 

[00:06:20] Eliot: And I should, if you click on it in Autoshot it should actually open up the finder to that directory. That's why it's an active, like that's the new one.

[00:06:27] Eliot: So you want the one above that? Synthetic script exported to, and then there's, there we 

[00:06:32] Micaiah: go. 

[00:06:33] Eliot: Uh, actually that new one. Yeah, it's the new new glance. So let's click on the SynthEyes one, right? That's, that's the guy. There we go. Okay. So now what we want to do is copy that directory, uh, string, cause we're going to tell SynthEyes where to look, uh, I forget how to do that in the Mac finder.

[00:06:51] Eliot: That's definitely 

[00:06:52] Micaiah: one of the things I've been looking through is trying to figure out how to do that in the Mac. How 

[00:06:55] Eliot: do we copy paths? All right, let me check. This is an excellent thing to figure out. How [00:07:00] do we copy paths in Mac finder? Uh, okay. Okay. So you can hit. Uh, if you highlight the, the file that, uh, uh, my project.

[00:07:16] Eliot: Okay. I think we got it. Um, so let's see, let's go to that direct, that directory and let's go to. Um, let's see, you can alt, let's see, press the option key and click on that. And then we should be able to say copy as, like, file path.

[00:07:43] Micaiah: As path name? 

[00:07:43] Eliot: As path name, there we go. That's it. Okay. That's a good plan. Now we can go to SynthEyes and then script, run script.

[00:07:54] Eliot: All right. And then paste it.[00:08:00] 

[00:08:02] Eliot: All right. 

[00:08:04] Micaiah: Which I can, I definitely know where it is right now. Do you want me to just go look for it? Yeah, 

[00:08:08] Eliot: you can go look for it. And I'm going to look for the shortcut because it's so useful to know how to copy and paste paths because you can get around really fast. Yeah. I'll just look for that while you're doing this.

[00:08:36] Eliot: Oh, I see. In the finder. Here's how to do it. Um, in the finder, let's just do it real quick so we can get it. Yeah. Um, and, yeah, let's go up to the finder. Mac Finder. Actually, yeah. Cancel outta that for a second because we already ran the script so that that guy's in there. Cool. And the Mac finder up in the, uh, file directory.[00:09:00] 

[00:09:00] Eliot: Uh, you're gonna go to, I'm sorry, view directory. Uh, very top. There you go. And you're gonna do view, uh,

[00:09:13] Eliot: should be show High Path Bar. I thought we were gonna try to show the Path Bar. 

[00:09:20] Micaiah: Because the path bar is down here, which in my, my searching for that through the tutorial, that's what I've found so far is that little thing that'll disappear or reappear. 

[00:09:32] Eliot: Okay, so show path bar. Can you paste in that? Can you double click on that and?

[00:09:37] Eliot: And highlight, uh, we're like, 

[00:09:40] Micaiah: not that I can see, cause it'll just give me, uh, it'll just give me continued paths. The more I click on stuff with allowing me to go back to different folders. Okay.

[00:09:56] Eliot: It's path. Let's see. Let me look at this real quick.[00:10:00] 

[00:10:12] Eliot: Oh, there. Uh, wait. I think you can, uh, control click on that. DFX drive. Let's control click on that. I think you can paste the path there. Uh, try control click. There we go. Uh, and then.

[00:10:30] Eliot: They don't, they don't make it as easy. Do they? 

[00:10:33] Micaiah: Not at all. Not for max. 

[00:10:35] Eliot: I'm like, come on guys. It's a path. It's like works. It works every. Okay. All right. I'll tell you what, let's get some guys crunching and then, um, and then we can like deal with this, the other stuff a little bit later. So, all right, so let's go ahead and click cancel.

[00:10:49] Eliot: Oh, it's trying to save. Okay. Yeah, there you go. Let's say wherever. Okay, so, uh, have you used SynthEyes much? 

[00:10:56] Micaiah: I've used it a little bit since playing with Lightcraft and for a couple of our other [00:11:00] vids, but I'm not, I'm not a master of it by any means. 

[00:11:03] Eliot: All right, let's, uh, let's first click on, um, uh, let's see, let's set your layout to camera and then let's go make sure we got our maths.

[00:11:13] Eliot: You can, uh, on the lower hand just click on Click on the RotaMask button real quick. Hey, there we go. We got to get RotaMask. Okay. So then, uh, we actually have something nifty and new, which I'm going to suggest because it's a multi peel script. And so to do that, let's, uh, first in SynthEyes, uh, let's go ahead and click script and then open the user script window.

[00:11:33] Eliot: Is it this one right here? Uh, keep going up about six, six, uh, six ones. Oh, wait, nevermind. You already got it. You already. So, okay. All right. Yeah. So let's, uh, let's fire that thing up. There we go. And it's gonna, and you can just move the Cynthia thing off to the side. Cool. That sounds good. So it should be crunching through that.[00:12:00] 

[00:12:06] Micaiah: So it was really just this, this shift scan that I needed to do that because it, I mean, it's working with the frames that we cut out perfectly now too. 

[00:12:15] Eliot: Yeah. Yeah. I think that was, I think it was, got hung up on like an old drive position. And so actually I should make some notes on this. So, uh, okay. So I'm going to have it suggest if it has a, finding a file problem and suggest shift scan on, uh, sending source directory, re scan the directory.

[00:12:40] Eliot: Cause we want, what we want to do is we want to put like, you know, helper stuff in, in the text of, Like, this is what's going on. All right. All right. So we got some, we got ourselves some blips. It looks like a good spot. All right. So let's, uh, let's go ahead and drag, uh, just click in an area where there's no mesh.

[00:12:55] Eliot: Uh, cause we're going to drag. Yeah, there you go. You got it. And just drag around that. [00:13:00] That's a good plan. I should be able to do, uh, track and then drop onto mesh. Track, drop onto mesh. That's the one. And let's scroll all the way to the beginning because the, the, for this constraint, okay. And so the there's, there's for this constraint to work, it has to exist on the very first frame.

[00:13:21] Eliot: Um, okay. Yeah, it has to be like, you know, it has to be, although actually I don't, there's no visible trackers on that first frame. Okay. Yeah. Let's pick, um, pick a couple more on this. So like, let's just, you know, uh, drag, select a couple, probably up on that wall, I think are going to be fine. Cool. Might want to zoom in and see it and accidentally select the wall.

[00:13:39] Eliot: Yeah, 

[00:13:39] Micaiah: there you go. And so for this, um, I need to make sure that Uh, it's available in the first frame for this drop onto mesh or for the solver. 

[00:13:52] Eliot: Yeah, for, for, um, uh, yeah, the drop onto mesh. So the solver, yeah, let's try drop onto [00:14:00] mesh. All right. Now let's, let's try solving. Let's see if how this, this guy works.

[00:14:04] Eliot: If it chokes on stuff, we'll have to figure out something slightly different. All right. Did that just choke on it? Oh, Okay. Nope. There we go. It's solved. Um, so let's scroll back and forth. Let's make sure that our coordinate system didn't go bonkers on us. Nope. That's about right. Yeah, it looks pretty good.

[00:14:22] Eliot: Everything, everything's fine. Okay. So let's, uh, hit shift C. We're going to clean up some trackers. And, uh, just, yeah, click bad frames. That's it. And then fix and then shift from automatic to refine is the big thing. There we go. And that way we're down. Hey, there we go. Okay. So you're not on the sub pixel level.

[00:14:44] Eliot: Um, yeah, yeah. Now this is, I, I've been working on this problem one way or another. I mean, I just cannot tell you, like, since I started the company. Way back when and this was because I knew is otherwise tracking will kill you. I mean, it'll kill your [00:15:00] project. Well, cold stone cold to everything else you can do, you know, modeling comp, this kind of stuff.

[00:15:04] Eliot: Tracking is a killer. Um, so yeah, this makes me very, very happy to kind of get a, You know, something where a team can handle most of the track and you're going to run into, if you go into a production, there's going to be a couple of wild shots that, yeah, what I'm going to do is start having a, um, like a couple of resources of like the SynthEyes gods to, you know, when, you know, cause actually that this track that's dropped on the mesh, I learned it from a dude who, um, Uh, we, we still sell these big, expensive systems.

[00:15:32] Eliot: And so we did a big installation at, at TV Globo in Brazil and he had been post tracking those shots and I found him on Upwork and said, he's in Brazil, it's like 25 an hour. So like smart dude. Great. And I want to, and he's like, Oh yeah, do this. I went, Oh, cause there's no documentation on this anywhere.

[00:15:50] Eliot: No, I've never seen anything 

[00:15:52] Micaiah: on this. 

[00:15:52] Eliot: I've never seen this. So anyway, Um, but yeah, I think, I think you guys are cruising. Um, and you'll go through it, you can do all the [00:16:00] rest of it. This is so okay. And so in the tutorial, I go through all this stuff of solving for distortion and these sorts of things, and yeah, you can, it all depends on how much distortion is in your lens.

[00:16:11] Eliot: If you have a wide angle lens, you can see these things, then you're going to have to do it. Yeah. I'll say there's a whole category of shots where if the distortion isn't that much. You know, you can just, you don't probably don't need it. Um, if you're on a lens that, um, I mean, you'll, you'll, you know, you'll see it, how much distortion there is or not, but it adds a huge amount of complexity and if for what do you, what do you guys aim it to do?

[00:16:34] Eliot: Actually, that's a really good, good question. So we 

[00:16:37] Micaiah: do, I think actually the reason that this, this workload is so helpful for us is because we do a lot of the action shots for a lot of the different, whether it's movies, TVs, whatever our bosses are getting pulled onto. Um, and so usually we're moving the camera a lot, whether we're doing shots from cars, we're doing heavy, heavy action while we're stitching in and we're stitching, uh, people between, uh, VFX bodies and real bodies.[00:17:00] 

[00:17:00] Micaiah: Um, and a lot of that kind of stuff. Either that or adding creatures in or vehicles into different shots for the pre visuals that we're pitching to the directors, pitching to the producers. So this is why this workflow is actually really, really helpful for us. 

[00:17:14] Eliot: Well, that's great. That's great. I mean, it'd be fun.

[00:17:17] Eliot: But this will, this will be really useful for people to see, see, uh, see what's possible. Um, I just love it. You know, you're, you're not a dedicated tracking team, but you're just using it as a tool to get to where you want to go creatively. That's like, that's what we're, we're trying to do. Um, all right, this is great.

[00:17:32] Eliot: So that way your, your previs and stuff that you send off to the director won't be doing this weird number, the crazy shakes. Yeah, because otherwise that's all they look at is like, why is it wiggling? And, and yeah, so. Okay. I think that's good. Uh, what's so what's your 3d Just so I have, I have a mental picture of that one.

[00:17:51] Micaiah: So I go through, I go mostly through Blender and then I, uh, so usually I'll bring it through since that SynthEyes, then I'll bring it through Blender and then I'll [00:18:00] bring it into after effects right now, it sounds good. 

[00:18:03] Eliot: Yeah, I haven't yet chewed into the, I know there's the distortion pipeline, uh, and I'll put from SynthEyes for after effects.

[00:18:10] Eliot: I haven't chewed into it yet. Um, I'd say again for, for the previous kind of stuff, I look very closely as to whether you need it because it, it doubles the complexity of the shot easily, easily. And as we just don't want it to wiggle. Yes. You need it. If you're doing final VFX place. Yes. You gotta, you gotta do it, but no for anything else.

[00:18:31] Eliot: And actually, honestly, unless you're shooting on a really wide receive the edges, both and, you know, whatever. 

[00:18:37] Micaiah: Yeah. And then at that point you can kind of, I think you can kind of play with it for revis without having to get a perfect, 

[00:18:43] Eliot: well, and the nice thing now is that you've now you have track shots, but everything isn't, isn't correct.

[00:18:48] Eliot: So one of the things that we're, we're working on, uh, is to have a templating thing so that you have your in point and out point, you're like, Oh, I love this shot, but I love it. I want to go back to a stage of [00:19:00] recreative with everything is having an automated thing where in, we can hit a button and in Blender, it'll create a shot template of like, here's camera, you know, start position and position with the dimensions, you know, camera, you know, FOV, like, you know, here's the sensor width, et cetera.

[00:19:14] Eliot: And yeah. So then you put it on stage, you, you hand out the piece of paper with dimensions to everybody on that, put it on stage, it's, it's framed up a hunt one to one what the, where you were when you got this, and I think that'll, that'll be a big, uh, big win. So that'll be a 

[00:19:30] Micaiah: huge game changer. 

[00:19:32] Eliot: Yeah. It's just, it's the data's already there, right?

[00:19:35] Eliot: You already got the shot. You know what you like, you know, you got the sequence, you've got the in and out points. All we're doing is. Is automating a process that otherwise is, you know, people do it, right. You know, like previous companies do it all the time, but it's, it's, you know, he might as well just automate it when it's the date is right.

[00:19:52] Eliot: You know, hit a button. And cause I, I think that'll be great for organizing, organizing shoots, right? Okay. We're doing this, this, this, this shot [00:20:00] here, you know, go in the day before and mark out like shot one, put a bunch of tape marks down. You're like, okay. Right here, you know, 

[00:20:07] Micaiah: yeah, which would be really huge for even just speed on production 

[00:20:12] Eliot: or, or, you know, it's interesting because I've, I've, you know, told that, that idea to a number of people, you know, the, you know, worked on big, big stuff and they all have this like, oh my God, could that happen?

[00:20:24] Eliot: Like, yeah, it's bad. It's meters and centimeters. We're not talking, we're not talking like orbital mechanics, man. 

[00:20:37] Micaiah: And at the same time, it feels so crazy to us just hearing that. 

[00:20:41] Eliot: Okay, good. In that case, what I'll do is we'll, we'll crank forward on that. And when we get the first Revit, I may send you, send you a ping so you can try it out.

[00:20:49] Eliot: And, uh, cause I think that's. You know, so much of this stuff is, is organically like you want to have that creative spark and then the organization, you, the boring stuff of getting a stack [00:21:00] of things, like nobody wants to do that. So then, and then you're, you know, spin your wheels at 40 people on set, which is that nobody, nobody said you have a good time.