Visual Effects has been a rapidly growing industry powering the world’s greatest movies. Yet as the technology has grown, the same processes of converting video into actionable environments to work with has not changed since the beginning. With a growing market at over $100B, there is a growing need to speed up iteration times and faster time to value when it comes to VFX. On average, CGI amounts to 50% of total production costs. VFX work can generally be categorized into the following actions
Raw footage subsequently goes through a series of steps to ensure that the video can be properly used for VFX. This is the point where a lot of time is spent (converting the real world into a digitized representation)
Thus we can see that the core problems are time consumption, cost, and lack of quality / error.
Current solutions are extremely time-intensive and expensive. Just a few hours of video can easily amount to more and more hours of tracking and environment set up. With current solutions, VFX artists a performing repetitive tasks building and mapping environments by hand, more time spent on mapping into a computer and less time working on real effects and assets.
We propose a solution that uses an additional sensor that can be attached to a camera to quickly streamline the process of going from raw footage to a fully compatible VFX scene. By streamlining the time it takes to map out the environment, introduce 3D assets, and track the camera, we can effectively reduce 30-40% of VFX time to make it faster to produce high-quality scenes with less error.