Make Hollywood-quality animations at low-budget prices with this motion capture suit

Rokoko^[1] is a new startup helping indie film and game makers make high-quality content with a new type of lower-cost motion capture suit.

You might be familiar with the industry-standard green man MoCap suit many Hollywood studios use to capture the movement of objects or people for movies and games. Rokoko’s new Smartsuit Pro produces the same quality animations but sells for a fraction of the price at $2,500, enabling indie filmmakers to get the same high-quality results.

It looks more like a ninja costume and comes equipped with 19 gyroscopic sensors embedded within the suit used as points for objects in motion. The suit comes with its own animation software but can be exported to many different animation platforms, including Unity, Blender and Maya.

Founder Jakob Balslev, an eight-year filmmaking veteran, just started shipping the first 300 orders for the suit and says he’s already sold to huge name customers — including someone working on one of the new Star Wars movies.

Baslev came into the TechCrunch studios with Fran Chung^[2], a principal dancer at the San Francisco Ballet, to show us how it works using some of Chung’s crazy ballet moves. Check out the video above to see Chung in action and get a better idea of what this suit can do....