Comment Commercials don't suck - consumers do. (Score 1) 46
I "make" commercials for a living and I'm proud.
It is of course more true to say that I contribute a fractionally small element towards some or more commercials, broadcast graphics, simulator rides, movie films etc etc
Ad execs (if that's who you wish to believe 'make' commercials) can prolly think of thousands of exciting new and original creative things to do - the problem being that no-one will pay you money to be original, creative and independant. Adverts aren't conjured out of thin air, they are bought and paid for by all the people who buy the products they advertise.
On a recent visit to the states I was shocked to hear American commercials directors rubbishing the more "creative" adverts as a waste of airtime because advertising is a "science" and the "personal" vision of creative directors is irrelevant to the majority of viewers / consumers / lemmings.
Timeslicing has been about for a year or two now, afaik there's one guy who invented it (Dayton Taylor / Timetracks) and a couple of poor imitators. Most all of the effective uses [of this technique] I have seen were done by him / his company. No-one else seems to get the sync quite right.
The first time I saw timeslicing (in the UK) was an advert for Capitol Radio a long while ago - it doesn't appear to have been the overnight gimmick that morphing was. One minute PDI morphed michael jackson's video the next day practically everyone was morphing everything - morphing is still a valuable production tool it's just been relegated to the "invisible" effects dept. :)
The problem with the flickering (light) is easy enough to correct ..umm.. hit the 'deflicker' button in flame or inferno, the fluttering (slight zooming in and out) is harder to fix but a lot of stabilisation will usually cure all but the most wildly misaligned cameras. What's practically impossible to fix however is badly synchronised shutters especially on faster moving subjects. Usually ropey frames can be morphed over but high complexity stuff like big splashes of water are too painful to try.
Hitachi have released a plugin for Composer that allows you to "Tour Into Picture" (called Tipit) (http://www.aw.sgi.com/??? nofeature yet!? ) (http://www.iijnet.or.jp/JAM/AD/TIP/TIP_HomeE.html ) that maps existing still pictures onto roughly defined perspective shapes allowing you to "move" into the picture - it can get very close to the timeslicing effect as long as you don't have busy, complex scenes with lots of layers of parallax.
PhatController
It is of course more true to say that I contribute a fractionally small element towards some or more commercials, broadcast graphics, simulator rides, movie films etc etc
Ad execs (if that's who you wish to believe 'make' commercials) can prolly think of thousands of exciting new and original creative things to do - the problem being that no-one will pay you money to be original, creative and independant. Adverts aren't conjured out of thin air, they are bought and paid for by all the people who buy the products they advertise.
On a recent visit to the states I was shocked to hear American commercials directors rubbishing the more "creative" adverts as a waste of airtime because advertising is a "science" and the "personal" vision of creative directors is irrelevant to the majority of viewers / consumers / lemmings.
Timeslicing has been about for a year or two now, afaik there's one guy who invented it (Dayton Taylor / Timetracks) and a couple of poor imitators. Most all of the effective uses [of this technique] I have seen were done by him / his company. No-one else seems to get the sync quite right.
The first time I saw timeslicing (in the UK) was an advert for Capitol Radio a long while ago - it doesn't appear to have been the overnight gimmick that morphing was. One minute PDI morphed michael jackson's video the next day practically everyone was morphing everything - morphing is still a valuable production tool it's just been relegated to the "invisible" effects dept.
The problem with the flickering (light) is easy enough to correct
Hitachi have released a plugin for Composer that allows you to "Tour Into Picture" (called Tipit) (http://www.aw.sgi.com/??? nofeature yet!? ) (http://www.iijnet.or.jp/JAM/AD/TIP/TIP_HomeE.htm
PhatController
