A key ingredient to creating high quality visual effects is the ability to recreate a digital replica of the environment in which the scene was captured. Accurate knowledge of the camera information and key measurements of the set are critical to aiding this process. The Visual Effect Camera Reports are the key record for most of this information.
Despite the fact that most studios agree on the fundamental data that needs to be captured on set, there has yet to be any consensus on a standard camera report format to record this information. We've set out to fix that.
The primary goals for developing the VES camera report are:
The secondary goals are:
The file format is a csv file, that combines slates and takes into a
single row per take, repeating the slate information for each row. The
take fields will be prefixed by "tk" to make them easy to
identify. The first line will include the file fields. For more
details see: Camera Report Interchange Format.
Where you are a studio, vfx vendor or data wrangler we welcome your input. Please review the camera report specification and give us feedback.
Even if you have no input at this time, please join the ves-tech-camera-reports google group.
The camera reports are available to download as a filemaker database. This is intended as a baseline. We encourage 3rd party vendors to produce custom solutions that support this format as a standard for interchange.
We plan to list additional 3rd party applications that support this interchange format. 3rd party support might allow integration directly with ingest, the digital cameras and script supervising systems, or simply a better interface than filemaker can provide.
3rd party tools supporting the interchange format:
This is been developed by Sam Richards as a project of the VES
Technology Committee, with assistance from numerous visual effects
artists and data-wranglers.
The original Filemaker database used as a starting point for this project was graciously contributed by Rhythm and Hues.
For more details about the VES and the VES technology committee,
please see Ves Home Page.
How to be involved
Downloads
File Version Size Downloads
Camera Report Database for Filemaker 12 and newer version 2.1 2.9 MB
Camera Report Database for Filemaker 11
version 1.1 7 MB
Self-contained filemaker camera-report macOS application
59 MB
Free iOS
Filemaker 17 to go
app
Blank camera report PDF for a paper backup.
160KB 3rd Party Integration.
Links
VES Technology Committee