What Camera Settings Best Emulate Human Sight?
404nicg
Posts: 270
For doing a Point of View Shot, how would I set the DAZ default cameras to get that just right?
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50mm is considered about equivalent to the FOV of the human eye
***EDIT - UPDATED ANSWER - 43mm
This is a great question. I wish I had a short answer but here's the best I can do: Try 35mm as a starting point and see how that looks to you and adjust from there.
For a longer answer:
The Aspect ratio of your final output is going to play a huge part in this.
The other thing to consider is we change what we focus on in front of us, so it depends on what you want the audiences main focus in the shot to be.
Our eyes see things very wide, so a wide angle lens usually gets the right feel. I usually use 28mm for POV, but have gone as wide as 15mm. Although scientifically speaking 15mm is incorrect, it looked good to me for that one shot.
Also, here are some reference points that I find myself always going back too:
Bad Boys 2:
http://youtu.be/hUZ9qAOaN5Q
^^Check out the POV shot at :11 seconds when they walk into the room after kicking open the door. That is a GREAT LOOKING shot and I think Bay & his DP used a 28mm lens on that one.
Point Break
http://youtu.be/kmvXdUaUqgA
^^The first POV shot is at :27 seconds. It looks like Kathrine Bigelow & DP used a 50mm lens on that one.
Interesting to note the differences in lenses between the two examples above, yet they both worked well in conveying the feeling of the characters POV in the context of the films stories.
In Bad Boys 2, Will Smith & Martin Lawerence are inside of a building and don't know what's waiting for them inside, so the wide angle shot gives us the feeling of taking in the entire room and not knowing what to expect.
In Point Break, Keanu Reeves knows EXACTLY what's going on, he is intensely focused and in pursuit of Patrick Swayze. The tight 50mm lens really gives the audience the feeling of his focused intensity.
Hope this helps.
50mm is the correct lens to best approximate the human vision field of view.
Are you talking Full Frame?
I have to say that in modern film & video, 50mm lenses seem like the ones most commonly used for POV, but they are usually found footage films replicated what the character sees through a consumer camera, not their actual eyes.
For FOV, 50mm seems to give a good feel of what the human eyes sees that is sharp and in focus, but it usually doesn't look right to me because our eyes see much wider than a 50mm lens.
It definitely does the job for scenes like in the Point Break example above though.
35mm lens on 35mm film format, (24mm digital) seems to simulate human eyesight the closest.
I can't stress enough that story & character play a huge part in all of this and I generally through all this scientific nonsense to the side.
If it looks good, it looks good, who cares if it's technically correct.
Agreeing that the ball park answer is 50mm.
However, that depends on the definition of normal and also just what the "50mm" is measuring.
The default "normal" pseudo-standard for still camera focal lengths is based on the 35mm film used in cameras for several decades. However, before that there were cameras and film sizes much larger, such as 8x10 inches or 4x5 inches. The lenses for those cameras had vastly different focal lengths and the focal length of a lens that produced a "normal" perspective image for those cameras would have been much much longer than "50mm". Also note that modern miniature cameras use lenses with very very short focal lengths, because 50mm would be beyond the back of the camera or cellphone. But because the photographic public has come to judge image perspective of a lens based on the lenses of the 35mm camera era, many camera manufacturers often specify their lens focal length attributes as an "equivalence" to the 35mm pseudo-standards.
So, what is "normal". The Wikipedia article describes it like this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_lens
But that boils down to this: Hold out an empty picture frame at a typical viewing distance and observe what you see through it. If you can then take a photo that when placed in that frame at the same distance from your eyes shows the same thing that you saw when it was empty, then the photo is "normal" and the lens would be considered a "normal" lens. The other possibilities are that a "wide angle" lens would produce a photo that includes more than you saw with the empty frame. A "telephoto" lens would produce a photo that includes less than you saw with the empty frame.
Avoiding the mathematics and the complications of two eyed vision and assuming that DAZ pseudo "camera" lenses are calibrated as if they were for 35mm cameras, then you can assume that a focal length setting of 50mm would be close to "normal".
Thanks for everybody's responses .. now when you say the size in mm (dinopt I see you say 43 mm) are you talking focal length AND focal width should be 43 mm?
1 - we unconsciously keep moving the eyes and the head to look around;
2 - beyond our clear field of view there is a fuzzy one which is covers almost 180 degrees!
Both items give us a wider perception than what appears from the simple geometrical eye sizes.
For further info see this page.
***EDIT - UPDATED ANSWER - 43mm
This is a great question. I wish I had a short answer but here's the best I can do: Try 35mm as a starting point and see how that looks to you and adjust from there.
For a longer answer:
The Aspect ratio of your final output is going to play a huge part in this.
The other thing to consider is we change what we focus on in front of us, so it depends on what you want the audiences main focus in the shot to be.
Our eyes see things very wide, so a wide angle lens usually gets the right feel. I usually use 28mm for POV, but have gone as wide as 15mm. Although scientifically speaking 15mm is incorrect, it looked good to me for that one shot.
Also, here are some reference points that I find myself always going back too:
Bad Boys 2:
http://youtu.be/hUZ9qAOaN5Q
^^Check out the POV shot at :11 seconds when they walk into the room after kicking open the door. That is a GREAT LOOKING shot and I think Bay & his DP used a 28mm lens on that one.
Point Break
http://youtu.be/kmvXdUaUqgA
^^The first POV shot is at :27 seconds. It looks like Kathrine Bigelow & DP used a 50mm lens on that one.
Interesting to note the differences in lenses between the two examples above, yet they both worked well in conveying the feeling of the characters POV in the context of the films stories.
In Bad Boys 2, Will Smith & Martin Lawerence are inside of a building and don't know what's waiting for them inside, so the wide angle shot gives us the feeling of taking in the entire room and not knowing what to expect.
In Point Break, Keanu Reeves knows EXACTLY what's going on, he is intensely focused and in pursuit of Patrick Swayze. The tight 50mm lens really gives the audience the feeling of his focused intensity.
Hope this helps.
This post really helps and puts things into perspective. Just got through watching both clips thanks for that. (sidenote: I've never seen Point Break but that was one hell of a chase scene)
This post really helps and puts things into perspective. Just got through watching both clips thanks for that. (sidenote: I've never seen Point Break but that was one hell of a chase scene)
Point Break was a great movie. Basically everything that was good about Fast and Furious was ripped off from Point Break (they essentially just swapped out surfboards for fast cars). Except Point Break had a much more believable and intelligent plot. If you haven't seen it, it's well worth a look.
I agree with the sentiment; this was a really great question and an excellent answer to help put things in perspective in very visually understandable way.