What is a "performance capture" animation movie?

Question

The recent movie The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn is a performance capture animated movie. What is a "performance capture" movie and what is the need for this technology when the same effects could be visualized using normal animation (think movies like Ice Age)?

Answer 1

"Performance capture" or "Motion Capture" is used to capture the actor movements where as Keyframe Animation is animating by hand like you said "Ice Age". I've been in the film industry a long time it's very rare that we don't need to correct or animate over the "motion capture" data. I've had in a few cases where we had to scrap the Mcap (Motion Capture) data and just redo the Animation because it just wasn't working correctly.

But it's very useful in my opinion and animators will still need to go in and animate over the Motion capture data the they get from a program like Motion Builder.

I hope that helps.