Maybe consider 3M reflective tape.
Did some testing, reflective tape, wowee, looks like leds. The other tape you can barely see is green gaffer tape for comparison.
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best thing that I used was a glowing ping pong ball with some velcro on it that way you can throw them up high quick. you can make them pretty easy or and I am not sure where I came across mine are just led ping pong and then I added the velcro to attach to the black screen.
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Might be a nob question, (but you’ll never find out unless you ask right). Why haven’t the camera manufactures developed a way of exporting the camera data so that we don’t need tracking points.
I’m watching the olympics at the moment and they are doing live tracking on the swimming. In rugby they are inserting logos on the field in real time.
Why don’t we have this data available on cinema cameras?
We could probably rig something like that up if we had mocap equipment and a few days advance access to both the camera gear and the location. My guess is no one wants to pay the additional gear and location fees.
There are ways of doing this but none so efficiently priced as a glowing ping pong ball wrapped in Velcro.
God bless you @space_monkey
@vfxjamie
What did you end up using for this job? I have a shoot just like this one happening and was going to do led’s but after reading this post - seems like reflective tape / glow in the dark stickers / ping pong balls might be the better route?
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I use these ones. Be sure to get the defusers too as they’re very bright in their own
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These style work well for me.
Mudder 16 Pieces Bicycle Light Front and Rear Silicone LED Bike Light Set Bike Headlight and Taillight Multi-Purpose Waterproof Bike Light Road Mountain Bike Lights and 10 Extra Batteries Included https://a.co/d/aOFmjgl
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do you diffuse them at all? or they seem okay as is? i’m going to be using these on a dark cyc and pretty dim so i’m worried about them being too bright. also i imagine i can make them not flash as they love to promote…hahah
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Yeah they can be solid colors without flashing. I didn’t diffuse mine but with some tape you could definitely do it down and dirty.
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@blakieman For that shoot we did some testing and the LEDs did not work in this case at all. They flared on the wide shots, and became huge bokeh kernels on the long lenses. Ended up using c-stands that were easy to fly in and out and move where needed with both regular gaffer tape and reflective tape. No harm was done, but the reflective tape didn’t work in most of the shots and the gaffer tape was actually brighter and tracked fine.
The reflective tape requires a light source basically shining directly from the camera in order to work. This can be demonstrated by putting a piece of tape on the wall, stepping back, and shining a flashlight on it. When you hold the flashlight near your eyes and shine toward the tape, it will reflect brightly. As you move the light source further away from your eyes, the tape reflection quickly becomes dimmer until it no longer reflects the light back at you at all. I’m curious if there is a way to shine something like an infrared light from the direction of the camera that would reflect on the tape but otherwise be invisible in the scene, but I’ve never had a chance to research or test that. Worth noting that reflective tape can also be incredibly bright, and may cause the same issues as LEDs wrt flares, blooming, etc.
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I’m just about to head into a shoot where I’ll need to be doing the same, but on a car so we can get an object track as it goes through a forest at night. The notes about the reflective tape are beyond helpful. The idea of an IR light source is intriguing. If you have a chance to test, please let us all know the results.
As of right now, I’m going the route of LED diodes. I’ve found that if you sand them back using a Dremel (or by hand if you have time) it does a great job diffusing them so they illuminate evenly around the whole diode and removed that crazy point source when you look straight down into the light.
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