Comments on: Interview: Avatar mocap producer James Knight

By: Chris

Chris — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 17:01:11 +0000

Wow,

this was really honest of James speaking open about how the production really was. Most of the time a pain in the ass and brutal.
But he stayed and pulled through and he continues working in the same area.

What system is he using besides optical marker based mocap? There is no real and better solution than that. Magnetic, sound waves? Come on.

I hoped he mentioned the outstandig effort the clean up team tackled after each shooting, receiving a selected take that was close to not solveable caused by occlusion or whatever.

This wrap up is a real pleasure to read if you work in the same area.

Cheers,

Chris

By: Ron F

Ron F — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 08:21:03 +0000

I think James’ new company has used a number of different mocap technologies. It’s not about jamming every round peg job into a square hole solution. Giant’s system, and everyone else’s, has improved vastly since the days of the Zemeckis films, Alice and Avatar. It is still easier to add actors to a passive optical mocap volume (cheaper!) BUT there are tradeoffs related to occlusion, setup time, global accuracy, cleanup, etc. The best tool for the job varies; no one size fits all. Especially in feature film production.

By: x

Wed, 25 Jan 2012 17:30:42 +0000

There’s some conflict of interest going on in the story as well. James’ new company doesn’t use Giant Studios capture system, it uses a non-optical system so the negative comments related to the optical system used on Avatar should be viewed with some suspicion. “we snapped it in, it was always wrong” “there would be occlusion and the system would get confused and start swapping markers, so we’d spend a lot of time [cleaning up] the data.”

By: Jim Thacker

Jim Thacker — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 07:41:17 +0000

As I mentioned in the introduction, the text is the highlights of a talk James Knight gave at CVMP, so after the part in italics, it’s all in his own words. (I’ve described it as an ‘interview’, as the session included a ten-minute audience Q&A, but it wasn’t a conventional one-on-one.) I did mention Giant Studios in the original text of the article, but I’d incorrectly stated that James Knight was still involved with the company, and I obviously didn’t do the update with much finesse last night! I’ll clarify that now.

By: _

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 23:33:06 +0000

No mention of Giant Studios? Seems like James did Avatar all by himself !!!

Did this author do any research on this or did he let James write the article for
himself?

Also I was closely involved with Real Steel from the first day of cap to final delivery
and not once did I see James Knight….