Back on August 14th High Fidelity’s band, AKA, that’s their name, published a video of the band performing a cover of the Commodores song “Easy”. The original video was accompanied by a promise that executive producer Ryan Karpf would provide a behind the scenes follow up post.
That behind the scenes post appeared this week : “Easy” Behind the Scenes. Inara Pey has eloquently covered this and Ryan’s hypnotic eyebrows already. However I’m going to cover it too, although I may pass on mentioning Ryan’s hypnotic eyebrows. That doesn’t count as mentioning them!
First of all, the production of this video involves a lot of peripherals. The actors used PrimeSense or Asus 3D cameras. PrimeSense were acquired by Apple just over twelve months ago. Faceshift software was used for the expression tracking.
Emily (0n vocals) and Ozan (on guitar) used PrioVR upper body suits.
Camera man Grayson was using, to quote Ryan, something like the Elgato capture unit. Audio editing was done in Logic and video editing done in Premiere. I’m assuming these are products from Apple and Adobe as those are the companies I know produce products with those names.
Ok so first of all, the average user is not going to have access to all of those peripherals and pieces of software. However we should bear in mind that this video and the follow up one are aimed at demonstrating the capabilities of High Fidelity. At this point you may be thinking that the future’s so bright I’ve gotta wear shades.
However that’s not all that was involved, far from it. Next came a Javascript script to utilise nine different camera positions. The beauty of the script was that it mapped to different keys on the keyboard, therefore camera 1 may well have been mapped to key 1, camera 2 to key 2 etc.
However they were far from good to go, whilst building the set they ran into a bug that High Fidelity’s Alpha users had reported. Basically having too many models in close proximity caused the server to crash. A technical explanation of the issue is provided by rad Hefta-Gaub. At this point I should warn you to beware of geeks bearing gifs. This is all in the video, well not the part about geeks bearing gifs.
Another issue they ran into was one of a rapid drop of frame rates whilst using Faceshift. This is something they are still looking into, but as Ryan points out early in the video, they are tasting their own dog food here.
The workaround was to split the filming of the video into parts. Some of the cast are filmed in one place and then another filming session takes place for Ozan on guitar.
This meant that some post editing work was required and several takes of the song were needed, with the one considered best being the master. The process sounds complicated and long but it also highlights the potential of High Fidelity.
Here’s the video of Ryan explaining how this all worked :
Ryan admits that after filming this, they have talked about how to make the process easier in the future and also how to add extra functionality of the camera capabilities. This is where Javascript may come in handy and if you’re a Javascript coder you may be interested in checking out Worklist in case they ask for assistance. There’s a contract address in the video if you have further questions.
High Fidelity is still very much in Alpha so don’t expect too much gloss at this stage but it is most definitely progressing nicely. Whereas people will most definitely baulk at the idea of all the software and peripherals used in the production, they will not be a requirement to participate in High Fidelity. Think of how motion capture suits can be used to create Second Life animations or some funky software and peripherals for Machinima. Those aren’t requirements for participating in Second Life.
High Fidelity will without doubt offer a wide scope to have fun with peripherals, as will other virtual worlds and ventures going forward. I’ll leave you with the final result of the work Ryan and the team produced.