With a film camera, you have to shoot a specific speed to make miniatures look real. How did you do this with a digital camera that only shoots 24 frames per second?

Most of the models in Episode II were shot digitally on a motion control system. In a film camera, the shutter is only open half of the time. The other half, while the shutter is closed, the film is being moved to the next frame. Since the digital camera doesn't need to do this, it's possible to have the shutter open essentially all of the time. We wrote some software that then lets us average some arbitrary number of frames to synthetically create longer exposures. For example, to simulate one-second exposures, we average 24 frames. This technique was used throughout the film.

The other case we frequently have to deal with is when we run the camera faster than 24 frames per second, like when shooting explosions. There was very little call for that on Episode II, since the explosions were done using CG techniques. If we really need to shoot a high-speed explosion, we have to do it on film. Perhaps someday we'll have digital cameras that can run at 300 frames per second, but we don't have them yet.

Posted: by Jedi Power