Mo cap is entering a golden age–or maybe a green one, as both new and established companies alike are churning out product to get or gain market share. As I mentioned in two earlier postings, established companies like Vicon as well as newcomers like Reallusion are just two companies at the show with cool gear in the booth or promised ‘real soon‘.

In part, it‘s because of the growing popularity of a more sophisticated generation of mo cap-based projects like Pirates of the Caribbean (just saw behind the scenes previews of Zemeckis‘ Beowolf at the Electronic Theater–looks great!).

The elements used in mo cap technology are being spun off for other uses too. Long-time motion tracking manufacturer InterSense (www.intersense.com) collaborated with 3D virtual studio developer Cinital (www.cinital.com) to create the latest in previsualization stages for Stargate Digital, which recently opened a virtual studio in Van Nuys, California. more

Better hardware and software are making it easier to do high-end work where it hasn‘t gone before. In July ESPN debuted The Bronx is Burning, an eight-part baseball - themed miniseries for ESPN Original Entertainment that used a compact, truck-friendly HD editing setup that makes for slick location production.

The production, shot on location throughout Connecticut (ESPN‘s home turf), employed Thomson‘s VIPER FilmStream camera system and a full 4:4:4 HD post workflow designed by Creative Bridge and Technicolor. A mobile truck dubbed Technicolor Creative Bridge‘s Mobile Digital Lab and Theatre (MDLT) included Globalstor‘s ExtremeStor DI workstation, a PNY provided Nvidia Quadro FX 4500 SDI card, and Assimilate‘s SCRATCH.

The MDLT truck–first introduced at NAB 2006–enabled 4:4:4 data capture from the Viper‘s storage, full 1920 X 1080 projection, real-time color correction, real-time HD-SDI playback, HD and SD down conversion, and direct to disk file transfers. more

Mo cap developer Vicon ended three years of development with the debut of Blade, new customizable Windows-based motion-capture processing software that is said to more or less offer a one-size-fits-all approach to the complex task of handling motion-capture data. Whether you are a small studio with a single camera or a studio the size of Sony Pictures Imageworks (a customer), the software is said to be easy to use. The Sony‘s of the world can dig deep and tweak as needed; the rest of us get a ‘wizards‘ approach that walks you through actor setup, acquisition, solving, occlusion cleanup, and general data wrangling.

The company also noted the ‘enthusiastic‘ acceptance of its FK Extreme; Pixel Liberation Front recently used the $50,000 turnkey mo cap system (eight cameras and software) for previz on a feature.

For those who love a contest, the company announced a mo cap film festival with a $10,000 prize. Selected films will be posted, of course, to YouTube for the public to love you or not. Make a short film between two and five minutes with the provided Vicon mo cap data at www.vicon.com/filmfestival.

Universal Pictures‘ Evan Almighty was designed to have visual effects of mythic proportions, and a raft of houses—including the big facilities Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) and Rhythm & Hues (R&H)—contributed to this Noah‘s Ark comedy. But alongside R&H‘s photoreal CG animals and ILM‘s flood simulation was an interesting contribution from the Los Angeles-based shop TeamWorks Digital. With its veteran Visual Effects Supervisor David Allen at the helm, TeamWorks temporarily set up shop at Universal Studios to wrangle disparate digital elements in several sequences. One of those sequences included a climactic scene that was added to the film well into postproduction. To achieve it, TeamWorks used an approach that Allen considers “postviz.” To read more, click here.