The Visual Effects Society (VES), the industry’s professional honorary society, has released a standardized interchange for camera reports, allowing essential visual effects information to be better captured and transferred through production into the post-production visual effects arena. The VES worked in collaboration with leading VFX companies for more than a year to standardize data fields and specify data transfer formats and create a new universal system for providing reliable camera sheets and metadata. The format is open sourced and is available with no fees or restrictions.
“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; yet, despite the fact that most studios agree on the fundamental data that needs to be captured on set, there has not been a consensus on a standard camera report format to ensure accurate notes,” said Jeffrey A. Okun, VES Board Chair. “We’re proud that the VES Technology Committee, under the leadership of Rob Bredow and Sam Richards, have successfully attempted to address this critical challenge and develop a much-needed solution.”
The initiative has received tremendous input from data and asset management companies and some of the industry’s biggest VFX companies through a dedicated working group. Third-party vendors are encouraged to produce custom solutions that support this format as a standard tor interchange and several companies have already pledged their strong support.
“We’re enthusiastically committed to supporting this new standard in an upcoming release of Shotgun and promoting it to the Shotgun community,” said Don Parker, CEO, Shotgun Software. “We hope it’s one of many steps to help the industry gain efficiencies around how metadata is tracked and communicated.”
“It has been a great honor to work with the VES on standardizing a format that allows for streamlined integration into our real time production backbone,” said Steve Cronan, CEO, 5th Kind. “We believe this standard will be a great contribution to the industry and integration will be released with our COREv4 platform in Q1 2014.”
The VES camera reports are freely downloadable as an example Filemaker database as well. More information, free forms, software and full specs are available atwww.camerareports.org. The interchange format supports multicamera film and digital shoots, as well as 3D stereo projects.