"Machine Masters"

[jorgy]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rostrum_camera
For whom like me that didn't know what a "rostrum camera" is.

-G

I get lost in wikipedia sometimes, and today was one was of those times. Clicking around to learn about the different camera, I came across this article about an early computer system developed by Disney and Pixar for scanning and compositing 2d animation:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAPS_%28Co ... _System%29

This was 1989 (remember the kind of computers we had then??) and they had better resolution than we have in HD today!

jorgy

[Captain Jack]

Its a bloody great camera which weighs over a ton ... not something you want to sling over your shoulder. Mine caught fire once, but that is a long story. Kids today don't know what they are missing ... clapper drives, dog clutches, rack-overs and snail drives. Tw oof mine had Bi-pack (which I have used many times) and an aerial image projector (tested but never used on production .

Considering your history with that sort of equipment, you might like (at least part of) this animation called "Fallen Art". If you haven't seen it, it's a little bit disturbing, but it's extremely well made. It's done in 3D CGI; there's a monster of a Rube Goldberg-like animation camera and projector system depicted in the video.

[rplate]

Rhoel Wrote:
If you check out the rest of the CV set, you will see I have spent many years as a rostrum cameraman, including multiplane cameras on features like American Tail II. From that I know that a real camera only has a Z axis ... It can only zoom in and out. Any North/South or East/West are achieved by moving the table holding the artwork (The compound). There is a separate control for the N/S, another for the E/W. The rotation has its own set of gears.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
http://www.stagetools.com/

Have you seen this plugin as well as the stand alone?
Made for FinalCut Pro
I tried the demo in FinalCut Express...doesn't work
but stand alone works great.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

[slowtiger]

Well, a rostrum camera doesn't necessarily be as big as a tank. I had one at home which was partly built by my father, basically just a rail mounted vertically to the wall which held two reels mounted in some wooden horizontal contruction which held the camera - Super 8. I had two 100 W bulbs left and right and an old table under it, that's it. The few times I really did a pan I glued cardboard strips to the table and moved the BG along it by hand, with the help of a tape measure to keep increments equal.

The one at Hahn was a Crass camera, a german brand famous for its relyability - but the company is long out of business now. Their cameras are still in use everywhere, especially at film academies. Hahn had two of them, one fitted with the standard table for E-W and N-S movement plus rotation. Overlays which needed to move at different speed had to be put on a special, moveable pegbar. All those axis had already been motion-controlled by a quite ancient computer (by today's standards), but it worked smoothly and calculated soft movements.

The other one came into the studio just before Asterix. Its table had 3 levels AFAIR, all of them moved independently and controlled by another computer. The guy who constructed it accidentially was my neighbour, he had a company called Kybernetische Maschinen. He mostly constructed machinery for theater productions, big moving props on stage.

What still makes me wonder is that all those really complex glow and fire sequences were still done under the camera with multiple passes of the negative, because other sequences in that film already came out of the computer. Asterix featured some combination of 2D and 3D which in their seamless integration still make me proud today, namely the storm sequence.

[Rhoel]

What still makes me wonder is that all those really complex glow and fire sequences were still done under the camera with multiple passes of the negative, because other sequences in that film already came out of the computer. Asterix featured some combination of 2D and 3D which in their seamless integration still make me proud today, namely the storm sequence.

Yup. Certainly this sequence was - shot much of it myself: Barry Newton was the other cameraman on this bit - both of us came over from Universal. I had the standard Krass during the late shift, Barry had the odd table. I shot the last scene on the film too - a multiplane ... Gerhard was somewhat worried as if it failed, he had no time for another take. It worked. The green stream was backlight and Supafrosts plus colour gel under the lens, the flame either perspex over the backlight and gels on the lens.

The ocean, boat and the Roman legionnaires Rolling ball sequences. etc, were computer generated.

[slowtiger]

Heh. The rolling ball sequence was partly done by me, in Photoshop on a Mac ... Some animator did the initial drawings of the Romans forming the ball, then I scanned them in and applied some distortion filters to it. Once the ball was rolling it came from 3D.

It was an odd combination of tools and techniques at that time. I had to multiply marching Romans for some weeks. They were animated as a row of 4 marching over the background in perspective. I had to scan the whole pile of paper (some 150 drawings or so) and then multiply them over and over again, putting them behind the front row so in the end it was about 300 soldiers marching. Then (!) the whole bunch of files was printed on big paper (about 1m x 0,3m), xeroxed on cels, which were painted by hand ...

Nobody would do it this way today. It was just done because the studio itself was in the middle of the process of going digital. I don't know about their actual equipment today, but at that time it was only two Silicon Graphics machines for the 3D stuff, and me with the Mac for scanning and some other specialties. We had a Solitaire film printer so we couldoutput to 35mm in-house, but it was a time-consuming process, about 1 minute for each frame. And we always ran out of disk space ...

[Mikdog]

Geez. What a mission!

[artfx]

Maybe, I need to make a more detailed Tips and Technics on this sometime.

Tonight I have to do the day job.

Rhoel

You mean this short isn't part of your job? This is something you did on the side?

[Rhoel]

Maybe, I need to make a more detailed Tips and Technics on this sometime.

Tonight I have to do the day job.

Rhoel

You mean this short isn't part of your job? This is something you did on the side?

My main job at present is/was script writing on a kids TV series ... this project started as a private short but I switched it to the studio when we needed to test what AS could do - think of it as an animation test, a throw everything at it and see how it fairs. The biggest problem I found was Sc 6 (the inside of the machine): It became too large to render - it had to be output in sections then the png files rebuild into a mov/avi video. Also the very large files sizes meant the machine was very slow in updating. Other than that, AS did well.

I've finished my contract on this series s o am a free agent again.

Rhoel.

[Rhoel]

We had a Solitaire film printer ...

Because the Solitaire and the Krass cameras both had the same type of Mitchell film magazine, I would sometimes have to unload the Solitaire and take both its output and the Rostrum exposed film over to the processing labs very late at night.

Now the processing labs were right next to a big cemetery in West Berlin, in the middle of nowhere ... now trying to persuade a taxi driver in my broken German, to take a geeky guy to a desolate place by a cemetery at 01:00 was sometimes something of a challenge

When I flew into this job, I arrived late on a Friday evening at sunset. It meant using the old city airport where you literally fly in between the buildings to touchdown. It was summer and I had to go straight to the studios in East Berlin. The Wall had only been down for a few months and much of it was still there. The taxi driver gave a great commentary as we drove through the city in twilight, pointing out the history and things which were changing so fast. It was a great trip, watching people enjoying the warm summer evening with a beer on sidewalk tables Paris cafe style, dodging the trams and vibrating across cobbled streets in the older East Berlin. It was a magical ride. I defy anyone not to fall instantly in love with city when you see it this way.

I get to travel and live/work in some interesting/obscure/exotic places such as Tahiti, Reunion Island or Curacao, but for me, Berlin is still the best.

Rhoel.

[Rhoel]

I'm inspired!!, Learned a lot from this thread.

Glad it helped.

There is another thought about backgrounds which I forgot to add earlier.

Many people start creating a background on a white screen - this creates very bright scenes. It's a very common mistake. Get a screen shot from many modern films such as Lord of the Rings, and then look at it in photoshop (using ctrl + L) - the levels are really low, yet you don't notice it.

I use a #333333 RGB 51/51/51 background colour (sometimes even darker. This keep the overall brightness down: That way, when you need to have a bright flame or light, the dynamic range/contrast is available to you.

Rhoel

[AmigaMan]

I've enjoyed this thread a lot - from the great animation that started it off to the talk of rostrum camera's.
It reminded me of the rostrums I've built over the years. My original (Super8) was made from my Dad's old photographic enlarger stand. My final one (around 1988) was built from Link 51 square metal tubing and featured handles to move the table N,S, E and W and sprung/pressured glass platten to keep cels and artwork flat. We used it a couple of times in the stop-motion studio I now work in to shoot some 2D artwork I animated for one of our 40 minute specials and for 2D effects in a pilot film. A few years back I donated the rostrum to a local media/animation college. As far as I know it's still being used.

This little clip (the image is little too but all I can find at the moment) is from an 8 minute pilot I animated and shot on the rostrum in 1990! Looks awful now

http://www.dalemation.free-online.co.uk ... horace.mov

[DarthFurby]

I want to make my own movies some day. Machine Masters reminds me that I have a LOOOOONG way to go. It may only be a test, but given the immense resources required for 2d animation there are so few people who can do it all, and I make a point to remember every single one of them.