EZCam: WYSWYG Camera Manipulator for Path Design

With advances in the movie industry, composite interactions and complex visual effects require us to shoot at the designed part of a scene for immersion. Traditionally, the director of photography plans a camera path by recursively reviewing and commenting path-planning rendered results. Since the adjust-render-review process is not immediate and interactive, miscommunications happen to make the process ineffective and time consuming. Therefore, this paper proposes a What-You-See-What-You-Get camera path reviewing system for the director to interactively instruct and design camera paths. Our system consists of a camera handle, a parameter control board, and a camera tracking box with mutually perpendicular marker planes. When manipulating the handle, the attached camera captures markers on visible planes with selected parameters to adjust the world rendering view. The director can directly examine results to give immediate comments and feedbacks on transformation and parameter adjustment in order to achieve effective communication and reduce the reviewing time. Finally, we conduct a set of qualitative and quantitative evaluations to show that our system is robust and efficient and can provide means to give interactive and immediate instructions for effective communication and efficiency enhancement during path design.