It might not be the correct place to discuss this idea but anyway.
What if we have a camera that can sense depth and output depth data in alpha values. If that happens rotoscoping will be much easier, produciton will be faster. Folks, what's stopping the industry from inventing this sort of hardwares ? I really want to know your thoughts on this ?



P.S : apology to those folks who found this completely irrelevant in this forum

There are a variety of tools that offer this, even complete packages with software. These are usually used in virtual production to avoid the green screen and light the scene as desired. I think the most difficult part is to match the depth data with the actual video.

There was the Lytro Cinema Camera.
It was pretty impressive.
You could change focus and depth of field in post. You could extract depth and mattes.
It recorded 755MP per frame that resulted into a 40K image up to 300fps.

But it was very expensive. Rental only. I think it was 125K a day.
I never heard of it being used in a production.

I guess fixing it in post was cheaper.

That is really impressive, I don't even think to put all in one piece.

stheo
But it was very expensive. Rental only. I think it was 125K a day.

Probably also of the size, this thing is huge.