props for camera dollying?
Mistara
Posts: 38,675
in The Commons
do you use props for camera dollying?
or rigged props for camera dollying?
focusing on a learning how to do a proper 3 point cut.
was watching the Avengers dvd bonus stuff. the fight between Hulk and Thor, camera was on like a train track.
scene when Hulk was chasing Black Widow, can't just parent the camera to her head. easier when character is running in a straight line, curves, people slow down
the rule of 3rds does seem to count in animation,

Comments
Assuming I understand your question, you can create a group containing cameras and lights, then animate by moving the group.
Why not just dolly the camera? That is, translate it along its Z axis (or use the shortcut from the view controls).
i've dubbed that the zwilly-vanilly method,
dunno, just doesn't work for me
the timeline adds a 4th dimension to animating, 5th dimension is time squared lol forgot where i read that
where am at now in workflow, to pan something in a 5 second cut
i set a long invisible cube (unflateable beam)
at frame 1 set the camera at 1 end, keyframe it,
figure where i want to be at the end of the 5 seconds and position the 'beam'
go to the timeline to frame 300, move the camera to end of the beam, keyframe
but that's just panning a landscape
add a few ambling dinosaurs,
trying to work this out in my head, haven't tried it yet,
rig a 3 piece dolly, a cone, a cube-beam, then cone, parent a camera to each cone, and then position the cameras by swiveling and scaling the center cube.
but then, rendering a running figure (like scarlet johansen)
would have to render from each camera (rendering 600 frames ouch) and then finding the perfect cut point,
cuz i dont really understand how to do a nice cut, i heard talk of 5 point cuts
do you see any holes in my logic?
been sleeping on theories, is giving me weird dreams, like, invasion of the tomato snatchers
Don't waste your time re-inventing the wheel. Go to mcausual's freebie site https://sites.google.com/site/mcasualsdazscripts/Home and you'll find that most of what you want to do has already been done via his wide variety of free Daz Studio scripts, a huge number of which are spedcifically for animaton. Combine multiple cameras in a single animated sequence? Draw the path as a line and have the camera follow? Smooth a rough camera move automatically or add a realistic camera lag? How about moving your camera with your Wii remote or doing full body mocap with a kinect? If it needs to be done in animation in DAZ Studio, MCasual has probably already done it and put it up, along with dozens of other useful utilities. Warning: block off several hours as there are a LOT of scripts and the possibilities they will put into your brain may be overwhelming.
Don't forget that if you parent the camera to the cube, when you scale the cube you will also be scaling the camera and that can throw everything off. Also, if your movement is generated by the cube and the axis of the camera lens... what's called the focal plane in live cinematagraphy... you're going to introduce a parallax shift as well. Most commercial dolly rigs use the dolly to generate moves in a single direction only, and then have the camera mounted on a jig or boom to handle left/right/up and down, which produces a much smoother perceived motion to our eyes, since everything we see is actually two different stereoscopic images merged together by our brain.
the jig and the boom?! thanks