Tools for tracking.(View point: DV)

Executive producer Brian Drewes of Brickyard VFX, a boutique visual effects house in Boston, remembers the circumstances that first brought boujou, a 3D camera-tracking software program from 2d3, into his facility two years ago.

At the time, Brickyard was looking to land a television commercial for Volkswagen that featured one continuous shot in which the camera makes a 360-degree circle around the featured car. The problem was that that shot had been taken the year before, and the current model of the car had different wheel rims. As a result, Volkswagen was considering scrapping the commercial altogether unless Brickyard could find a way to doctor the shot to seamlessly insert CG models of the new rims onto the car.

Even though Brickyard regularly uses Discreet's flame and combustion to perform all kinds of visual magic, Drewes admits that performing this particular trick would be nearly impossible to pull off using their existing camera-tracking capabilities.

Eager to find a solution and win the job, the staff decided to place a call to Oxford, England-based 2d3, which, they'd heard, had a powerful 3D camera-tracking program called boujou. "We told them we have this scene and we'd like to see if they could track it," recalls Drewes. "We told them that if they could get the track and we got this job, we were going to buy boujou. They tracked it very quickly and sent it to us, and we were very happy with the results. The track was perfect. And that one job paid for the cost of the software."

Since then, Brickyard has used boujou on several occasions, most recently for another Volkswagen commercial promoting a cross-marketing campaign with Apple. This commercial featured another continuous camera movement that started with a close-up shot of an Apple iPod located inside a Volkswagen Beetle, and then rose skyward through the car's sunroof. Although it might look simple, it proved to be a complex shot that required the use of numerous composites and boujou's camera-tracking capabilities. "Without boujou," says Drewes, "we would have had to spend a lot more time tracking by hand."

While an increasing number of compositing programs are beginning to offer motion-tracking functionality, including such low-cost applications as Adobe After Effects, these capabilities tend to be limited to point trackers, which are useful for tracking 2D objects in a scene. Yet, 3D camera trackers offer significantly more sophisticated capabilities due to their ability to track objects and camera moves in 3D space.

"Point trackers have no knowledge of the camera, so they cannot help you when the object you are tracking goes out of a shot or behind something else in the scene," explains Chris Steele, CEO of 2d3. "Because boujou builds a knowledge of where things are in 3D and the way the camera moves, it knows where things are and how they are moving in 3D."