projection onto dancers on stage

[eyesaregood]

hi everyone...i'm a long time listener, first time caller

i'm working with Arena and Z-Vector in a project designed to feature "Design and Technology" here in Houston.

We have done some amazing things and I'm happy, but I have one problem I can't solve and I hope you experts can shed some light.

I know this is not a particularly new idea, but we want to project onto dancers, only, while the stage remains black. My idea is to use one layer of Arena with an appropriate blend mode to project a layer of graphics that is keyed out. This way we are actually covering the stage with projection that is just seen as black. Then I would like to use the live camera input layer to reveal the keyed out graphics.

I assume this will give me nice tightly conformed visuals on the dancers, without the need for a Kinect etc....

...thanks in advance for your suggestions....

matt

[DayVeeJay]

I tried a kinect and was very disapointed in the amount of latency. Totally unusable for dancers. I saw one project where they lit the cyc with infrared light. When viewed with an IR camera all you saw was a silouette. I havent done any testing on this. One issue that may or may not be a big issue is the difference in lenses between the camera and projector. Like I said I havent tested it and it may be a non issue. I am very interested to hear how it works out for you.