feature highlights:

anim/shake cameras

Contains two cameras, where the shake camera is parented to the anim camera.  Both are selectable in the UI but the shake camera can’t be independently manipulated in the viewport.  Its movement is restricted until shake is applied, and then it is limited to the max/min of its keyframe values.

film back settings

A customizable list of film backs that match real-world cameras.  When building a project camera, your project supervisor can designate or limit which film backs are available to artists.  This ensures conformity and consistency for the project/sequence. You can also add custom film back settings.  Setting up the project camera is really easy.

focal lens selection, zoom

Define a list of focal lengths available to your shot artists and conform to a specific lens pack.  This ensures conformity and consistency across the project/sequence.  If your on a previs project, the Director or Cinematographer will probably establish guidelines you’ll want your artists to match.

Setting the lens pack list is really easy, just select the desired focal lengths in the UI and hit Apply.

To use camera zooms, you have to enable zoom in the channel box of the camera.  The zoom focal length attribute will then override the presets defined by the lens pack.

measurement tools

A bunch of measurement tools are built into the camera rig.  Tilt/Pan/Roll, speed, distance to subject and height are live unless you choose to disable them.  You can define how the speed and measurement data interprets the scene units and also which units get displayed.  If using the vseHUD, all this data gets directly fed to the hud node.

depth of field

Uses Maya’s built in DOF.  It’s not the best, but it works ok. If you decide to use it the controls are exposed in the camera’s channel box.  There’s another attribute to turn on a visual representation of the focus plane in the channel box.  By default, the focus distance is connected to the “distance to subject” locator, so defining a subject in the sceneTools UI will keep the focus plane at the subject.