Blog Post

Frame Accurate Motion Control

Scott Ferril • November 22, 2019

It's not always pretty, but necessary.

For those that have hoped for a repetitive move only to find that the frames didn't line up, this is the answer.  When a camera shoots 24fps-30fps while moving at anything but a super slow speed, there is a vast difference between every frame.  When shooting the successive passes, the camera will shoot frames that are now consistently between the first pass frames, and none will line up.

To overcome this issue, the move must be tied to the frame synchronization of the camera pulse.  A genlock signal from the camera will tell our motion control system (Flair) when the frame is actually shot, so the motion control can be in the exact position on each pass.  This is highly critical, but often overlooked.

With our system, we can also link lighting changes, electrical devices, pneumatics and solenoids to exact frame counts or timecode.  Forwards and backwards.  We can link to song time codes for music videos or music queues.

If animation is to be mixed with live action, this matching is again vital.  We connect with Dragonframe.  We can scale moves and resize objects. We can scale time as well.  

Don't get fooled.  If the camera is not linked to the motion control, the takes won't seamlessly match.
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