Quote - Yes, I concede that many of the points you make are valid and correct. However, don't kill my fantasy of having this be a preview of the next version of Vue either. Who knows what this may inspire the Vue programmers to do? I think right now, many Vue animators are simply aspiring to re-create the 10 second quality of a Phoul's animations which seems to be so elusive. So its fun to dream....maybe that's my attraction to a virtual 3D world. While the real one goes to pot, the possibilities in a virtual world are seemingly endless (even if elusive for the time being).

Philippe only has one real 'secret', and he tells it on his webpage; he is a cinematographer. He knows not only -how- cameras move, but what kinds of cameras there are, how they behave, and how you assemble and plan a professional cinema scene. He certainly doesn't have some uber-system able to run 5 iterations of Maya at once (well, he does have access to an uber system where he works now, but I kind of doubt they let him play on it all that much.... :) ). He uses all his tricks in his video tutes he sells at Cornucopia. Try looking at one, only tell your brain that you are dealing with a physical camera, with the same limitations. People are expecting him to be treating the Vue camera as a digital viewing fustrum, and he doesn't. It's a lens and a box with mass, and it has movement limitations due to rigging. =And the camera action in a scene has to be built up in logical layers=. Look at some of his shots it that light. You'll see the only exceptions he takes is being able to go from one rig to another with no break in shot (oh, like doing a long dolly shot along the ground, with the telltale jiggle you see in a fast dolly, then going to an airborne rig with no scene cut). That doesn't mean it is easy; people who have trained their minds to think of an apps camera as the software gimmick unbound by physics that it is are getting tripped up by their own training. Well, look at the CG exterior shots in the new Battlestar Galactica. Those animators are using the same tricks that Philippe does (except for the jerky zooming; must be a rookie on the zoom ring); camera trailing and overshoot because the bloody thing has mass, and it is hard to get moving and stop, plus the the fact you have a delay built into it due to human operation. It takes time for the eye to see, find, tell the brain, which tells the muscles which moves the camera to where it was told....only the object in the viewfinder isn't quite there because it was still moving while all that was going on. So you catch up, then have to stabilize your aim on the object, and things are cool....until it changes speed or direction, and you have to go through the loop all over again.