Building a Camera Motion Control Rig
113,112
Published 2022-12-12
Do you think static camera shots are boring, with the camera sat still on a tripod? Well, some YouTubers have camera operators, which makes the footage look super fun, and they can interact with the YouTuber too. William Osman has a camera operator called Cameraman John. But who exactly is Cameraman John? I’d love to make my footage look super fun too, so today I’m going to build an AI-driven robot camera operator that can do lots of fun things, just like Cameraman John. I'm using an A.I. deep learning model on running on a Jetson Nano to track where I am in the shot and move a pan-tilt-zoom camera gimbal. There are also some other special features.
CAD and code: github.com/XRobots/CameraBot
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HARDWARE/SOFTWARE
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All Comments (21)
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I started a Discord! discord.com/invite/fc6MedG7eW
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This is the most universally useful project you’ve built in a while. I hope to see this in use on all your future videos.
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It's how cameraman John films when he's drunk!!!!
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This mimics most every youtube cameraman weirdly perfectly. Its motion is just slightly shakey and the movement speed is such that it really mimics a person holding a camera. you've done a lot of awesome projects, but this is weirdly the one I'm most enthralled by
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I’m pretty sure most other YouTubers if they produced this kind of content would stretch it out over about five videos. Amazing amount of work and skills, not to mention the experience and understanding required to produce something like this. All crammed into one short video. My head is spinning.
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For a first iteration, it's remarkable how human like the outcome is. Amazing as usual, James.
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Man, if you continue using this as your official cameraman, I would actually be sooo happy
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Train it to recognize a "frame this" gesture where it points the camera exactly in the center of the rectangle shaped by your indexes and thumbs. that way you don't need to fiddle with the remote to set up the static framed shot!. Another idea I had is making it toggle between "wide framing (full body)" and "portrait framing (half body)" by recognizing the "T pose".
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You had me at the demo already, loved the motion and how alive it all became, really felt like a second person filming it!
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I hope this is a mainstay of the channel. The camerawork is actually pretty good and having a robotic cameraman is very on brand.
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Very cool project. You might be able to also track heads in order to make the response slightly faster if your head goes out of frame
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This is one of the coolest projects yet. You've just put thousands of cameramen out of the job. lol. It works so well. One of the foot switches should do this: hold the switch down and the jetson will start tracking your hand. You put your hand where you want the camera to look at (like a closeup of what you are working on) and let go of the pedal and it will stay there until you hit the pedal again where it will start tracking you again.
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This is cool. I wonder if the "seasickness" effect could be reduced by leaving it slightly zoomed out and then applying stabilization in software. I don't think it's quite to the point of an actual human, but it's still pretty good.
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The most amazing part for me is that this one can actually move around, unlike similar projects on YouTube. What would be great is if it was programmed to follow some composition rules, like diagonals or simple thirds. In theory you could get transitions like from Stanley Kubrick's movie while you can focus on working on your project.
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I'm genuinely impressed at how good the result is, considering you probably haven't devoted thousands of hours of software development to the tracking, its basically functional and adds a level of dynamic to the camera work which is more interesting than static shots. There are obviously lots of "user interface" options to explore to make the filming seamless and fit your video making style. It will be interesting to see if or how much you use this in the future.
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Absolutely amazing! One suggestion: A second wide angle camera (like a GoPro) could also be used, just so the robot can get an idea of where things out of frame are, just like how a human camera operator can using their own eyes
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It's crazy how good that looks, genuinely looks like you have someone operating it
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It is crazy how organic that looks! mad respect
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You could absolutely mass produce this and sell it to YouTubers.
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It does exactly what you wanted! It adds more of the human element to the viewing experience, and it feels like we're really there. Awesome! 👏
