cmiVFX - Autodesk Smoke And Flame Stabilization Reasoning

cmiVFX keeps launching video grenades each and every week with the latest and greatest lessons you can find. This week, we make available a lesson requested by one of our customers for the new Smoke 2013 OSX which is in Public Beta and free for all to learn and use. We kept this video short and sweet, so that our customers wouldn't have to spend a lot of money learning about features currently still in development. We are however confident in Autodesk's move to the new software platform and will be releasing non stop videos for Autodesk Smoke and Flame for years to come.

Chapter Descriptions
Introduction
The very basis of this video was created from a cmiVFX user request via twitter. We are working on lots of different camera solutions for the high impact sports enthusiasts. Many of the shots we are using, are captured from smaller camera rigs with the intention of capturing some sort of arial stunt in mid act. This series of "mini" cmiVideos will focus on the daily routines of fixing and preparing footage for use in commercial grade shots. We believe it is our duty to show users how to take mediocre material and turn it into gold. Some of the higher end lessons, do not allow for the gritty truth of solving horrible artifacting, rolling shutter, and motion blur issues often found in todays digital cinema. This video will talk about the new tools in Smoke and Flame that are common to both applications, and show you how to get the most out of creating a smooth looking shot out of a very bumping source material.

Reviewing Your Materials
Each shot is its own animal. There are no ways to copy a node tree and repeat it for more than 2 shots in any given scenario. Some shots will be easy, some will be next to impossible, but each one will have a natural path that will make itself clear after analyzing visually the very content of the shot. Sometimes you have no moving objects in the scene, sometimes you have several, but what about a rain cloud? Imagine billions of water molecules all moving in there own little direction. Depending on the lighting, angle and distance of the shot, you can fool the mechanical system into perceiving solid objects.

Types Of Stabilization
There are several ways to stabilize as is there are several ways to track. Bases on similar technology, learn how to find and use the several different tools inside of Smoke that allow you to pick the type of stabilization you want to use. In this video, we show several methods.

Stabilizing
Now the main task is at hand. You know what you have to do, but does your software? Learn how to communicate with the setting inside of Smoke to allow for your shots to smooth out in the best possible way. Each time you try a setting, different results could occur. To perfect the usages of this process, you will need lots of practice on a variety of different material. In this case, we found the most difficult object to track and stabilize so you can see how robust these tools can be.

Retiming
Now there are some things that you can learn from the manual, but there are equally as many things you can't. Learn a simple trick to make your shots look smooth as ice. Optical flow can be used for more that just analyzing data! In this chapter, we seal the deal with smoothing out the shot.