Talk:Motion capture

Marketing department

1/19/2009: Ironically I wrote the original Active Marker System paragraph, since I work for PhaseSpace and it got changed by Vicon and other companies to water down any reference to the company. I also wrote most of the segments in this article that have to do with technology rather than companies, and movies, and no one complains about those paragraphs. This includes the Active Marker, Magnetics, Passive Marker, RF and other sections. Every time I try to make this a level playing field it starts another Wiki War. This whole article needs to be re-written by someone with no bias, rather than just differing bias. Tmcsheery (talk) 20:08, 19 January 2009 (UTC)

The first line sounds like the marketing department wrote it.

I've reverted to "hobo" because the character isn't simply a generic "homeless man". He is a hobo: living on his own, "riding the rails" on the sly, fixing his dinners over a campfire, etc. It's how the character is identified in the credits. "Hobo" is a culturally and historically appropriate term, and it describes the character more correctly than "homeless man" does.

The paragraph about active motion capture reads like and ad.

I believe Final Fantasy "Spirits Within" holds the distinction of the first fully motion capture feature and not Polar Express. Both have motion capture and some animation thrown in on the top, but Final Fantasy beats it by a few years.

7/22/06: The Final Fantasy movie wasn't done with performance capture. The idea behind performance capture (and how it differs from traditional motion capture) is the fact, that first, the performance of the actors is captured to a computer (and possibly composited together, if all the actors in a scene weren't captured simultaneously). This is basically just traditional mocap. The difference comes after: In performance capture, the cinematography is done with a "virtual camera" that the cinematographer (or director, in Robert Zemeckis's case) moves around. The scene is rendered live and shown on the camera's viewfinder and the movement of the camera is captured as well, so it's possible to get more lifelike handheld camera movements, than it would be, if the movements were animated on a computer. No if only someone could make this apparent in the article.

And I agree, all the stuff about Imagemetrics and Phasespace read like an ad. Apparently someone from their marketing departments thought it would be a good idea to put a little marketing hype on wikipedia.

To me the difference between motion capture and performance catpure is that motion capture deals with just capturing a motion, which could be a crash test dummy in a car, or a footballer throwing a ball, or a kid walking across a room that has force plates in the floor. But performace cature deals with capturing an actors performance and in addition deals with part of the process of delivering that performance to the screen (capture, cleanup, retargetting, editing, placement). I think one of the first characters to really illustrate this was the relationship between andy serkis and gollum. Any any point of the production if there was any question as to what gollums performance was to be, the usual answer would be found by "looking at the andy reference". This reference may be filmed footage or motion capture data. The performance of andy was key towards the creation of gollum, and this to me is an illustraion of "performance capture". Zemekis and sony imageworks have taken "Performance Capture" on in a big way, but they by no means invented it. I would agree that final fantasy was the first film to use motion capture in a big way, but it would be wrong to say "fully motion capture" as there is always an editing process an animation augmented to the mocap. An example of making a movie without using performance capture would be to mocap 10 different people for the lead role, and let the animator or motion editor re-edit the performance to remove the unique subtleties that each actor brings and insert their own. I hope this illustrates my view of the difference between motion capture and performance capture. This article is full of application specific examples that has obviously been written by a vendor or someone close to a vendor. It also seems to use terms "Performance Capture" and "Motion Capture" interchangably. There is a lot of content that belongs under "Motion Capture", but there is some valid content that talks about "performance capture". Do Sony Imageworks or Zemekis have a trakemark on the name "Performance Capture", I thought I read that somewhere a while ago. Peeldog 00:24, 5 September 2006 (UTC)

Spammed Link, What to do?

The target of the link to the world records of motion capture has been usurped by WikiSpammers -- an amazing daily rate of edits, and no apparent way to restore a sufficiently-old page to restore sanity even momentarily. Judging by the varying content, it may even be competing spammers.

I was able to navigate to a good page by clicking on the Home tab on the target Wiki, and then World Records tab. But I'm afraid that if I were to update the link on this page, it would lead to the good page being spammed instead, if it were being found due to being linked from here.

Now, these folks at the Motion Capture Society somewhat deserve what they get for running their Wiki so poorly, but I'm not eager to cause them more grief, nor am I eager to remove a link to an otherwise good (if small) site (better than all these commercial links), and yet the link as it is does not serve the reader.

For now, I'm going to annotate the link. I hope someone has a better idea. I hope the people behind the Motion Capture Society get their Wiki act together and block these spammers... Bob Kerns (talk) 18:23, 9 February 2008 (UTC)

More Merge Talk

My feeling is this article should be about motion capture technology and not the use, i.e. the process of digitally capturing real life motion data. Performance capture is an application of motion capture, as gait analysis in biomechanics, as is tracking an object to shoot it down by the military, as is a camera watching an assembly line so a robot can pick it up, etc. I think all the applications should be separate articles, and this article should cover the various technologies and methods, not the implementation by application or industry (save for the other articles). --Peeldog 03:55, 26 February 2007 (UTC)

Don't Merge: Peeldog makes a great argument. Performance capture is an application of motion capture and not motion capture. --Xmurdoch 01:53, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

Don't Merge: Agree with above. Indeed, "Motion Capture" gets about 8x more pages on Google than "Performance capture" (9.7M v. 1.25M) - mocap is clearly a topic in its own right. --80.7.96.98 (talk) 00:24, 5 December 2012 (UTC)

Advertising?!?

It seems to me that the External Links entirely consist of companies supplying mocap products or services — is this in keeping with Wikipedia policy? --OldCommentator 16:13, 6 August 2006 (UTC)

Yes, most if not all of the External Links consist of mocap companies and are not keeping with Wikipedia policy (Wikipedia:Neutral point of view). Ramirror 01:13, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

Yes, the External Links to manufacturers websites should be removed. One compromise would be to create another article entitled "List of Motion Capture Companies". This has been done for a number of other articles. 007patrick 06:29, 16 May 2007 (UTC)

I did not add external links to the edit I just made, but if you want a source for the mention of Disney distributing the Motion Captured film "Christmas Carol", here is an article: http://www.variety.com/article/VR1117968136.html?categoryId=13&cs=1

I had added Motek Entertainment to the external links list since they offer free motion capture data, not just for commercial linking. This edit keeps getting deleted. I will add a "List of Motion Capture Companies" section and post it there. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 85.144.216.199 (talk) 23:14, 16 September 2009 (UTC)

Merge with 'Performance capture'

• Merge: Absolutely merge. Performance capture is not new nor is it unique. It is motion capture. Very unprofessional marketing from Image Metrics and Phase Space.
• Merge: Extensive article on Motion capture covers the topic nicely. Performance capture is essentially the same thing (with facial capture added).
• I agree completely. In the film industry we use motion capture technology to capture a performance. It makes no difference if points are added to the face; it’s still mocap. This should be folded into the Motion capture article. --