As we did "3D photos"
A few years ago, on the website pleer.ru I met photos of goods that could be rotated, viewed from all sides. I was very impressed. Periodically, I met similar services on other sites. Since I myself am a photographer, at some point I suggested to my friend to create a studio to make such videos. A friend was very impressed with the idea and we began to think.
In this article I will try to tell you how to do this technically, what difficulties may arise and what you need to pay attention to if you want to do this.
I do not claim the universality of the solution. Just tell you how we did it.
So, first of all, it was necessary to do “something”, on which we could rotate our objects. It was necessary to do, taking into account the fact that the objects can be of completely different sizes: from telephone to motorcycle (the largest one we shot was a scooter and a person). It was decided to make a podium with a turntable. Found among the familiar Kulibins, which were welded from metal pipes, frame 100x100cm with bolts instead of legs (so that the level could be leveled), there was a steel pin 2cm in diameter in the center, which rotated on the bearings, and the platform on which the objects were already installed was installed on this pin . Depending on the object, there could be a circle made of white plastic, glass or wood painted white (if something was heavy) as a platform.
The podium itself was lined up in 36 parts - so that the turn of the platform was 10 degrees. An arrow was attached to the pin to accurately measure the degrees.
It is very important that the whole structure be heavy and not move / loose from the slightest impact. The podium was painted white, and on top you could put a translucent black cape, if you needed deep shadows (translucent - to see the markings in degrees).
')
Unfortunately, I have no pictures of “live” design. I post a render that allows you to imagine how it all looked:
with translucent walls to make it clearer
without walls, so that you can see the frame
The whole structure was stationary, because it is important to expose everything as accurately as possible. Exposed, scribbled on the floor grid. Camera on a powerful tripod. The positions of the legs of the tripod were marked on the floor. It is impossible to install the camera “once and for all”, because the objects of shooting can be very different in size, and, accordingly, we need a different distance from the camera to the object, different height of the camera and so on. Simply put, for each object (more precisely, a group of similar objects) all the same had to adjust the entire system.
After the design was exposed, the light was installed. We used Falcon Eyes pulsed monoblocks as illuminators. In my opinion, for such purposes, a constant light is better suited. It will allow to achieve the same maximum illumination in all frames, since the pulse sources (especially budget ones) can provide a small power plug. But, having figured out how much power constant luminaires are needed and how much we will spend on electricity, it was decided to use pulsed sources. Monoblocks were placed on standard racks and soft boxes of 50x50 cm were purchased for them. A total of 2 monoblock units with soft boxes for filling light and 2 monoblocks for background lighting were used.
There were two backgrounds: black from non-woven material, because it absorbs light well and gives a very deep black color, and white - paper.
The walls of the studio, of course, made black to avoid parasitic flare.
A camera bundle (Canon 30D) was made with a laptop via Bluetooth and a telephone. I already wrote about this . The camera is placed on manual focusing, with a sufficiently large depth of field, so as not to think about the accuracy and speed of focusing. The whole process was this: set the object exactly in the center, focus, switch to manual focus. Click, the frame is made. The platform turns to the next division. And so 36 frames.
When shooting several objects in a row to determine where one ends and the second begins, I just took one frame with the lens closed. Canon 17-40 f / 4 L USM and Canon 70-200 f / 4 L IS USM were used as working lenses.
Then came the most important point - you need to collect a single clip from a pile of frames. We ordered a freelancer to implement everything that we needed on a flash. Namely:
At first we inserted frames with our hands, but it was very dreary. Therefore, it was subsequently made so that the flash drive was unified, and picked up links to pictures from an XML file. This greatly accelerated the preparation of final clips.
They rolled our construction on things at hand - phones, televisions, toys. Then came the first and very serious problem. It was not possible to make a frame that could be inserted into the final movie without processing. To get to the exhibition, remove the traces of the site and fix all sorts of stuff, the frames had to be edited. Separately it is worth highlighting the problem of dealing with shadows. Now imagine how much time it takes to edit everything. You can easily drive off. And if the order for several hundred objects?
Here are examples of what came out “straight from the camera,” without processing:
The second serious problem was the question "how to fix this or that object."
If you can put a TV or a toy car without problems, then with telephones, for example, such a focus will not pass.
It is necessary to clearly understand a simple thing: one thing is to make a single video, another thing is to make a stream. Absolutely everything can be done. Spend a lot of effort, a lot of time, but to do it. But putting it on stream is much more difficult.
Example: We were approached by a person who sells Parker pens. He said that he was interested in this technology and he was ready to order from us videos for all products (about 500 rollers). At the same time, the person wanted the handles to rotate in 2 planes. We thought for a very long time. We tried a huge number of solutions, how to fix the handle, how to rotate, but, alas, we could not find a universal solution. Make one video - easily. Tinkering, editing, it would be possible. But to make a few hundred videos ... Either it would have required a tremendous amount of time and effort (read, it would not have paid off in any way), or nothing would have happened. We had to refuse the order.
After more or less everything was run in, tested and there was an idea of ​​how and what to do, we began to look for customers. They sent offers, called shops, which this offer might be of interest.
Quite a few were interested in whether there is a possibility of exit shooting. Yes, there was an opportunity, but for this it was necessary to allocate for us the premises of certain parameters. Customers could not find (or allocate) such a room and refused.
Quickly enough, we found a customer in the face of an online store selling toys. They gave us lots of robots, we quietly removed them. Everyone was satisfied.
After some time, we contacted the store selling samovars. They already had such videos on the site, but they were not satisfied with previous performers and they decided to contact us. Working conditions with them were very difficult. They could only give samples on weekends. On Saturday morning, we took 20-30 boxes of samovars and about 20 sets of tea sets, and on Sunday afternoon we brought them back. Fortunately, my partner had another business and had the opportunity to connect a Gazelle for transportation.
To say that it was hard to say nothing. Imagine, to make a storyboard, we needed: open the box, unpack the samovar, wipe it, install, shoot, pack, close the box. Most of the time it took this packaging-unpacking. Plus mirror samovars. The slightest touch to it - and the imprint remains. Work had to wear gloves.
Then you had to process and prepare everything that was taken. At the same time, the delivery of offers and telephone calls to potential customers continued. But if someone was interested, he was ready to make 2-3 videos. For many, the price of 500 rubles for one video seemed very high. As a result, having worked for about six months, we decided that this undertaking does not justify itself at all. No money we got from this. Therefore, it was decided to finish all current orders and close.
Like an epilogue.
In conclusion, I want to touch on the topic of competition and share my thoughts on all this.
There were several studios that actively promoted their services of this kind. Among them was a terrible dumping. Some claimed that they could make 200-300 clips per day. In fact, they did an order of magnitude longer and worse (these are not my thoughts, but the responses of their real customers). Others put a price of 150 rubles for a video that did not fit in our heads at all. On the topic of competitors now, I think you should not ask me questions. I'm talking about the situation a year ago. What is happening now - I have no idea.
The following problems were with customers:
My personal opinion is that potential customers simply did not understand the advantages of this technology. Yes, we can assume that we did not work well and could not explain to them. But this technology has not received its distribution in principle. Unfortunately.
Here are examples of what we did (these are not final videos, but rather workers. The final ones are located at the customers.):
Robot
D-rex
Samovar
And a bonus :)
18+
In this article I will try to tell you how to do this technically, what difficulties may arise and what you need to pay attention to if you want to do this.
I do not claim the universality of the solution. Just tell you how we did it.
So, first of all, it was necessary to do “something”, on which we could rotate our objects. It was necessary to do, taking into account the fact that the objects can be of completely different sizes: from telephone to motorcycle (the largest one we shot was a scooter and a person). It was decided to make a podium with a turntable. Found among the familiar Kulibins, which were welded from metal pipes, frame 100x100cm with bolts instead of legs (so that the level could be leveled), there was a steel pin 2cm in diameter in the center, which rotated on the bearings, and the platform on which the objects were already installed was installed on this pin . Depending on the object, there could be a circle made of white plastic, glass or wood painted white (if something was heavy) as a platform.
The podium itself was lined up in 36 parts - so that the turn of the platform was 10 degrees. An arrow was attached to the pin to accurately measure the degrees.
It is very important that the whole structure be heavy and not move / loose from the slightest impact. The podium was painted white, and on top you could put a translucent black cape, if you needed deep shadows (translucent - to see the markings in degrees).
')
Unfortunately, I have no pictures of “live” design. I post a render that allows you to imagine how it all looked:
with translucent walls to make it clearer
without walls, so that you can see the frame
The whole structure was stationary, because it is important to expose everything as accurately as possible. Exposed, scribbled on the floor grid. Camera on a powerful tripod. The positions of the legs of the tripod were marked on the floor. It is impossible to install the camera “once and for all”, because the objects of shooting can be very different in size, and, accordingly, we need a different distance from the camera to the object, different height of the camera and so on. Simply put, for each object (more precisely, a group of similar objects) all the same had to adjust the entire system.
After the design was exposed, the light was installed. We used Falcon Eyes pulsed monoblocks as illuminators. In my opinion, for such purposes, a constant light is better suited. It will allow to achieve the same maximum illumination in all frames, since the pulse sources (especially budget ones) can provide a small power plug. But, having figured out how much power constant luminaires are needed and how much we will spend on electricity, it was decided to use pulsed sources. Monoblocks were placed on standard racks and soft boxes of 50x50 cm were purchased for them. A total of 2 monoblock units with soft boxes for filling light and 2 monoblocks for background lighting were used.
There were two backgrounds: black from non-woven material, because it absorbs light well and gives a very deep black color, and white - paper.
The walls of the studio, of course, made black to avoid parasitic flare.
A camera bundle (Canon 30D) was made with a laptop via Bluetooth and a telephone. I already wrote about this . The camera is placed on manual focusing, with a sufficiently large depth of field, so as not to think about the accuracy and speed of focusing. The whole process was this: set the object exactly in the center, focus, switch to manual focus. Click, the frame is made. The platform turns to the next division. And so 36 frames.
When shooting several objects in a row to determine where one ends and the second begins, I just took one frame with the lens closed. Canon 17-40 f / 4 L USM and Canon 70-200 f / 4 L IS USM were used as working lenses.
Then came the most important point - you need to collect a single clip from a pile of frames. We ordered a freelancer to implement everything that we needed on a flash. Namely:
- A flash drive, in which frames were inserted alternately.
- Animation control buttons: start “rotation”, stop “rotation”, frame forward, frame reverse, slider to control the speed of “rotation”
- buttons increase 1x, 2x.
At first we inserted frames with our hands, but it was very dreary. Therefore, it was subsequently made so that the flash drive was unified, and picked up links to pictures from an XML file. This greatly accelerated the preparation of final clips.
They rolled our construction on things at hand - phones, televisions, toys. Then came the first and very serious problem. It was not possible to make a frame that could be inserted into the final movie without processing. To get to the exhibition, remove the traces of the site and fix all sorts of stuff, the frames had to be edited. Separately it is worth highlighting the problem of dealing with shadows. Now imagine how much time it takes to edit everything. You can easily drive off. And if the order for several hundred objects?
Here are examples of what came out “straight from the camera,” without processing:
The second serious problem was the question "how to fix this or that object."
If you can put a TV or a toy car without problems, then with telephones, for example, such a focus will not pass.
It is necessary to clearly understand a simple thing: one thing is to make a single video, another thing is to make a stream. Absolutely everything can be done. Spend a lot of effort, a lot of time, but to do it. But putting it on stream is much more difficult.
Example: We were approached by a person who sells Parker pens. He said that he was interested in this technology and he was ready to order from us videos for all products (about 500 rollers). At the same time, the person wanted the handles to rotate in 2 planes. We thought for a very long time. We tried a huge number of solutions, how to fix the handle, how to rotate, but, alas, we could not find a universal solution. Make one video - easily. Tinkering, editing, it would be possible. But to make a few hundred videos ... Either it would have required a tremendous amount of time and effort (read, it would not have paid off in any way), or nothing would have happened. We had to refuse the order.
After more or less everything was run in, tested and there was an idea of ​​how and what to do, we began to look for customers. They sent offers, called shops, which this offer might be of interest.
Quite a few were interested in whether there is a possibility of exit shooting. Yes, there was an opportunity, but for this it was necessary to allocate for us the premises of certain parameters. Customers could not find (or allocate) such a room and refused.
Quickly enough, we found a customer in the face of an online store selling toys. They gave us lots of robots, we quietly removed them. Everyone was satisfied.
After some time, we contacted the store selling samovars. They already had such videos on the site, but they were not satisfied with previous performers and they decided to contact us. Working conditions with them were very difficult. They could only give samples on weekends. On Saturday morning, we took 20-30 boxes of samovars and about 20 sets of tea sets, and on Sunday afternoon we brought them back. Fortunately, my partner had another business and had the opportunity to connect a Gazelle for transportation.
To say that it was hard to say nothing. Imagine, to make a storyboard, we needed: open the box, unpack the samovar, wipe it, install, shoot, pack, close the box. Most of the time it took this packaging-unpacking. Plus mirror samovars. The slightest touch to it - and the imprint remains. Work had to wear gloves.
Then you had to process and prepare everything that was taken. At the same time, the delivery of offers and telephone calls to potential customers continued. But if someone was interested, he was ready to make 2-3 videos. For many, the price of 500 rubles for one video seemed very high. As a result, having worked for about six months, we decided that this undertaking does not justify itself at all. No money we got from this. Therefore, it was decided to finish all current orders and close.
Like an epilogue.
In conclusion, I want to touch on the topic of competition and share my thoughts on all this.
There were several studios that actively promoted their services of this kind. Among them was a terrible dumping. Some claimed that they could make 200-300 clips per day. In fact, they did an order of magnitude longer and worse (these are not my thoughts, but the responses of their real customers). Others put a price of 150 rubles for a video that did not fit in our heads at all. On the topic of competitors now, I think you should not ask me questions. I'm talking about the situation a year ago. What is happening now - I have no idea.
The following problems were with customers:
- did not understand the benefits of this technology
- did not want to spend money (it was easier for them to take pictures of the goods from the site of their neighbors)
- could not give samples for filming
My personal opinion is that potential customers simply did not understand the advantages of this technology. Yes, we can assume that we did not work well and could not explain to them. But this technology has not received its distribution in principle. Unfortunately.
Here are examples of what we did (these are not final videos, but rather workers. The final ones are located at the customers.):
Robot
D-rex
Samovar
And a bonus :)
18+
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/132624/
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