The most common use these days is to pull actors into videogames. In the 90's, they used live action cutscenes because the graphics weren't up to par, though neither was the acting, really.
Another reason to go through this process is to make live-action movie special effects look more realistic. It'd be tricky to make a man morph into a green Hulk using make-up and film effects. Not that it hasn't been tried, and tried again, with varying degrees of success.
(1912, 1931, and 1981.)
But even less dramatically, if you use this method, and you decide sometime down in post production that you want the scene to be look another way -- everything from the costuming, to the actors, to the camera angles, to the setting -- it wouldn't involve a total reshoot, which would be massively expensive. Just juggle a couple of numbers and re-render. I think that's probably the holy grail of this process.
posted April 13 2008 12:45 PM
