New Tech Brings Virtual-Practical Hybrid Productions to More Modest Budgets
We’re incredibly excited about a big announcement from HTC Vive at NAB this year—they unveiled the Mars CamTrak, a camera tracking solution that allows for camera movement while seamlessly blending actors with virtual environments. Until now, only high budget projects like The Mandalorian were able to afford working this way, but the Vive Mars brings this tech to earthly budgets.
Productions with more modest budgets have been creating their own solutions with duct tape and a prayer, using old Vive trackers designed for the VR space (the controllers that allowed you to point and click around) and doing their best to hodgepodge something together. But with the Vive Mars, there’s now a commercial, off-the-shelf solution specifically designed for this need—and it’s dramatically more affordable than the other camera trackers out there.
For a low price point, Bard Tales clients can now take a person, film them practically, use green screen technology to remove the background and replace it with whatever they want. That replacement background can interact with the camera exactly as a real background would in terms of position, depth of field, parallax, etc., because of all of the tracking tools in the Vive Mars.
What this ultimately means is that more and more Hollywood-style visual effects options are available to creators working at all price points. Last year, when Bard Tales took the hosts of Century21 Redwood’s team and put them on a computer-generated set that we created, we had to keep the cameras relatively static to pull the effect off. Had the Vive Mars been available then, it would have opened a lot more options to us in terms of camera placement and movement—and that’s what makes us very excited.
We’re already thinking of ways we can help our clients tell even more compelling stories using this technology. Call us today to find out more. In the meantime, check out our work and reach out to us for all your video production needs.
