ZEISS recently announced a major advancement of the ZEISS CinCraft Scenario camera tracking system. With software release 2.0, the powerful and flexible solution can now also be used for tracking with selected lenses from most popular cinema and broadcast lens brands. “Up to this point, CinCraft Scenario had only been usable by productions working with ZEISS and ARRI/ZEISS lenses”, says Christophe Casenave, responsible for Cinematography Products at ZEISS. “With this release, we make our camera tracking system available to many more users including broadcasters.”
Scenario 2.0 introduces pre-calibrated lens templates and the Lens Template Finetuner, increasing flexibility and compatibility while also saving a great amount of time. CinCraft Export 1.0, released at the same time, makes recorded tracking data ready for post-production software.
Users can now utilize templates for over 90 lenses from more than 10 lens series that allow for skipping the recording of lens distortion by offering pre-calibrated lens characteristics. With the new Lens Template Finetuner, users only need to match generic lens templates to specific real characteristics of the lenses used in the respective project.
The user-friendly software wizard guides users through the finetuning process step-by-step. This eliminates the complexity often associated with lens calibration and cuts lens preparation time in half. Finetuned templates can then be saved. In addition, CinCraft Scenario 2.0 allows users to load and finetune lens calibrations previously created with Ncam Reality, further enhancing their production flexibility.
ZEISS also releases CinCraft Export 1.0, a standalone software for Windows PCs, that enables users to export the recorded tracking data to industry standard file format FBX, as well as OpenEXR lens distortion STMaps. This makes it easy for a user to re-apply their live tracking data for post-production applications such as post-vis.
“We’re happy to make CinCraft Scenario available to more projects – not only through extending support to more lens brands – but also by providing the recorded tracking data for post-production. We will expand the number of supported lenses gradually over the months to come and look forward to offering full manual lens calibration later this year, making CinCraft Scenario usable with every cine and broadcast lens available,” Casenave concludes.
The ZEISS CinCraft Scenario release 2.0 with templates for select cinema lenses from ARRI, Cooke, Angenieux, Leitz and Fujinon, and broadcast lenses from Canon and Fujinon, plus the Lens Template Finetuner, is now available as an update directly in CinCraft Scenario. All available lens templates are selectable in the software at no charge, with more added gradually over the next months. The full release notes for CinCraft Scenario 2.0 can be found here: zeiss.ly/scenario2-0. Check also the following links:
Overview of supported lenses in ZEISS CinCraft Scenario 2.0: zeiss.ly/scenario-lenses
CinCraft Export 1.0 can be downloaded here: zeiss.ly/export-download