Red9 ProPack : Dynamic Timecode management within Maya for Cloud Imperium Games

Complex Production Timecode Tamed!

Ever wondered how a massive production like Cloud Imperium Game’s Squadron 42 deals with the physical amount of performance capture data. How do you manage the sync of separate animation and audio files over multiple shoots, syncing data of headcam footage with audio trimmed and edited into smaller game clips? This demo goes through live assets from CIG and demonstrates the new Dynamic timecode support within the ProPack itself. This is a massive integration of all of our timecode management and syncing systems, expanding on our previous work to produce a very flexible new way of working. This is very relevant to anybody dealing with mass facial performance data.

CIG wanted to track facial performance capture, on-mass, from a master video edit and EDL, cut offline from all the Headcam footage from an entire days performance shoot. The issue was that they then ended up with a single headcam video sequence, containing multiple non-consistent timecodes, yet still needed to be able to sync all the edited audio clips back to the data tracked from this single video.

The tools allowed them to do just that in a simple workflow that not only auto-synced the audio back to the data, but also setup all the export ranges, names and events as well as creating individual r9Anim files of each clip, allowing them to be later loaded back against the body data. Note that the export ranges in the demo were actually extracted directly from the original offline EDL file itself.

Massive thanks to Cloud Imperium Games for letting us show this internal demo.