Why is Avatar a revolution in film technology?

Technical Revolution 1: 3D camera infinitely close to human eyes

Avatar was shot with a 3D camera developed by Cameron and his partner Pace. This is Pace Fusion 3D digital camera. Where is the fusion camera more advanced than the traditional 3D photography technology?

Traditional 3D cameras use two cameras arranged side by side to simulate people's left and right eyes. Because of its huge size, it can't be placed very close, but it can only be pointed straight ahead, which is inconvenient to move and can't operate the lens as freely as ordinary 2D movies. Fusion camera is composed of two small high-definition digital cameras. The distance between them can be adjusted as needed, and they can also be rotated. Therefore, they can adjust their angles to focus on very close objects, and they can also shoot distant objects in parallel with each other. Its working principle is very close to that of human eyes. The picture taken by such a camera can restore the orientation of the subject more accurately, so the "three-dimensional sense" is more realistic. Moreover, it is light, can be moved at will according to the director's needs, and can also shoot 2D and 3D pictures at the same time.

Reflected in the picture effect, movies shot by traditional 3D technology often need objects with different depth of field, such as foreground, middle scene and background, or when an object moves in depth in the picture (such as a ball flying to the audience), it will produce obvious stereoscopic effect. In the movie Avatar, we can find that even if there is only a close-up of a face in the whole picture (there are many such shots in the film), we can still feel the "three-dimensional sense" of this head without moving the position. Therefore, in Avatar, Cameron abandoned the flamboyant expression of traditional 3D movies (there are no balls flying around in front of the camera), but let the audience immerse themselves in the environment created by the movie in an all-round way, and the audience will feel that they are watching through a window instead of looking at the screen. There is a scene in the film where the hero Jack sees the giant trees, waterfalls and jungles outside through the window of the plane. Because of the depth brought by 3D, the audience will feel that they have seen such beautiful scenery with their own eyes.

New technology 2: Virtual camera that can "make something out of nothing"

This is another great invention of Cameron. It is actually not a camera, but a monitor with an LCD screen. This monitor, which can move and rotate at will, can preview the real-time CG picture generated by the computer synchronously when shooting the actor's performance, and can watch the picture effect at any angle and display ratio at any time.

Most of the shots in Avatar are made by real people and computer CG. In most cases, actors are dancing in the air in an empty studio, with no scenery at all, and their Pandora planet will be added by computer in post-production. Before Avatar, when the actors performed, the director could not see the final CG effect, so he had to rely on his imagination.

With the virtual camera, this bottleneck is broken!

While the protagonist was running on the plastic board in the studio, Cameron previewed the 3-meter-high blue Avatar climbing on Pandora's Hallelujah Mountain. Although the picture quality on the monitor is very rough, which is only equivalent to the video game picture of 10 years ago, this function is very important for CG movies. Before Avatar, real-time preview technology was always a difficult problem.

New technology 3: upgraded motion capture technology

Since CG technology was introduced into movies and animation works, motion capture technology came into being. Many viewers are familiar with this technology, and almost all CG scenes in movies and animations will use this technology.

However, in order to shoot Avatar, Cameron completely upgraded his motion capture technology. Because his idea is to let the actors' performances be transmitted to the computer as much as possible 100%. "Actors can't just dub the characters and then let the animators spend two years doing the rest. I hope that the live performance can be accurately expressed. " Cameron said. Moreover, he hopes to control the shooting of virtual scenes like monitoring real shots.

New technology 4: expression capture technology

The most iconic technology of Avatar is to make CG characters' expressions real. In previous CG movies, the appearance of human characters was made more realistic, and once she/he spoke and smiled, she immediately showed clues. /kloc-this is the case with the all-CG movie Final Fantasy 0/0 years ago. Although the heroine's millions of hairs are made one by one, and the characters are fake, her stiff expression still makes the audience see through its CG essence at a glance.

In Avatar, Cameron invented a helmet with a camera fixed on it, which stretched out 2.5 inches in front of the actors. There are many green dots on the actor's face, which provide tracking reference points for the camera. The camera records the most subtle expression changes of the actor's face and synthesizes the data into the virtual characters in the computer. The monitoring picture transmitted to the director through the virtual camera can achieve the accuracy of facial close-up at any time.

In this way, the slightest expression changes of the actors are accurately transmitted to the computer-generated blue Na 'vi people, so they become lifelike!