Tracking Focus
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Description

The following was kindly submitted to the community by Aurel Wildfellner.

"I just wanted to point out my master thesis to you. I started it in late 2011 so it is sort of dated. It is about automatic focus control/tracking. I wrote an extensive thesis, the entire (experimental not productive) software is free software and published an early demo at siggraph as well (where most of the early demo shots are from).

https://atommuell.mum.jku.at/~aurel/focustracking/

I put a lot of time into it and back then it was sort of ahead of it's time. Today we already see similar products for advanced focus control but still rather simple and not as experimental and daring as the techniques I explored. So this was basic research.

I sort of moved on and didn't develop this into any useful tool for filmmakers. However, if someone is planning to work on something similar in your community, I would be happy to help out or even join the effort again."

RexOr created this task.Mar 3 2017, 1:03 PM
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The test footage looks amazing.

Would be also very helpful for conference recording when speakers are running the whole time over the stage.

Would be also nice to use this for autofocus with kind of an AI that finds the important object or select it via touchscreen.

Maybe Aurel can work something out when we have the hardware done? Maybe we need to build a small 3D vision unit to put under the Beta. We can also save the point cloud to work later in 3D programs like Blender. So you don't need motion tracking the content later to work with it in 3D space.

So much possibilities...

This is really impressive...

We shoot a lot with steadicam or just handshoot in paragliding and skiing and it can open so much possibilities to track a subject with a low aperture..

In the future it's can be really usefull to select a subject with touchscreen like @davidak says, and maybe with wifi control to use it under a drone.

A good DIY tuto for the first step : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hgZ4pThR8z0