When a movie is more CG than it is real — think movies like Avatar or any of Pixar’s stuff, where all or nearly all of the environment is rendered — a new challenge appears: the camera.
Getting a fake camera (like the one in a rendering program) to move and behave like a real camera (like the one that the camera guy is traditionally holding) can be a pain. Testing a scene from a whole different angle is less “hey, let’s try that again real quick and I’ll shoot it from over there,” and more “hey, let’s tear open keyframes and rework a bunch of carefully set parameters.”
James Cameron and the folks at Pixar have been solving this with “virtual cameras” — physical camera-like devices that let videographers shoot fully virtual scenes much like they would shoot any scene in the real world. They tie a simulated camera to the movements/orientation of a real-world camera proxy, and push everything the simulated camera “sees” back to a display on its real-world counterpart in real time.
As you might expect, these virtual camera rigs are… not cheap.
Kert Gartner, the VFX artist behind the REALLY, REALLY good mixed-reality trailers for VR games like Space Pirate Trainer and Fantastic Contraption, has hacked together a solution of his own:
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Source: TechCrunch