Video as an Input

If you have a video taken analogically to taking images for photogrammetry, you can use it instead of photographs and/or laser scans, or as a supplement to other project inputs capturing the same object or scene. As always, you are not limited to the number of such videos. (You can even use this feature to cut any video into a sequence of pictures for purposes other than use in this software.)
RealityCapture extracts purely key frames from the videos (defining the starting and ending points of any smooth transition) and ignores interpolated frames (synthetized by a codec, which are geometrically inaccurate) doing its best for you to get the result you want.


Without any additional codecs other than in the native Windows' pack, you will be able to import these video formats: Advanced Systems Formats (.asf), AVI (.avi), QuickTime (.mov), MPEG (.mpg, .mpeg, .mp4), and Windows Media Video (.wmv). Output frames are PNGs.

You can also import a sequence of images captured by Leica BLK3D in a .cmi file format.

What is Leica BLK3D?

It is a simple device with the size of a smartphone with two 10 Mpx cameras which are synchronously creating sequential images at the same time. Since the relative position and the distance between two cameras is known, RealityCapture can use this kind of data to automatically scale your model without needing any further actions or input. Then you can take measurements in the scene, add other inputs that are not scaled and align these data together to scale them all.


Procedure

  1. To import a video or more of them, go through the Video Sequence button in the WORKFLOW tab, or simply drag and drop videos into your RealityCapture project.
  2. Once selected, you will be taken to the settings’ dialog, where you need to choose a location for the extracted frames to be saved to, and their time span – namely Jumps' length(s) – defining a pause between 2 frames. When importing data in .cmi file format, this dialog is skipped.
  3. After clicking on Import, the videos will be split into frames and loaded into the application. You will be able to find them in the Images root in the 1Ds panel.
  4. Now you can proceed with adding other inputs or directly to aligning them and further processing like usual.

See also: