My poor man version of this (using web tech) https://jt.io/posts/bullet-time/
This is awesome!
There oughta be a bullet time video booth
101–110 of 111 posts
Re: There oughta be a bullet time video booth
#102He's using digital single-lens reflex cameras with moving mirrors in an application where you don't need that, but do need a good camera. What do you use today when you need a good camera with no user interface?
A Pi HQ camera with a lens of your choice. It's easy to synchronise any number of Pi cameras together, and with the RAM on them each camera can store a long sequence of frames (add an RF-trigger flash using BBC microbits to each one to control motion blur).
That's a component. It needs packaging.[1] That bulky lens needs support that's reasonably rigid and resistant to vibration. Four 2.5mm screws on the PC board of the sensor are not enough. Support needs to be near the center of gravity.
In the original article, the author describes his camera mounting problems.
[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/raspberry-pi-high-quali...
Re: There oughta be a bullet time video booth
#103I'm usually a big critic of AI, and I remember seeing people complaining years ago about increasing framerates with AI[0], but maybe this could be a good usecase. You do, say, half the cameras, and then some crafty solution to interpolate (filling in the edges with AI, some sort of angle adjust) [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KRb_qV9P4g
I want to show the creator this specific video on DAIN (Depth-Aware Video Frame Interpolation): https://youtu.be/sFN9dzw0qH8 !
Re: There oughta be a bullet time video booth
#104That camera had an MSRP of $899 when it was new in 2006 [0]. Amazing that they now sell for only £50, and still take fantastic pictures even by today's standards [1]. Technological progress is nothing short of remarkable. [0] https://kenrockwell.com/canon/rebel-xti.htm [1] https://onfotolife.com/camera_sample_photos?camera_id=30&pag...
lenses maintain their value for a very long time. camera bodies, not as much.
this is still a huge amount of money, to me.
Re: There oughta be a bullet time video booth
#105Pinnacle Effects in Spokane, WA did this for an ABC Sports Baseball promo in the late 80s using 60 point-and-shoot film cameras arranged in a 360° ring. Gerry Cook was the director and the guy who came up with the idea and physically created the “ring cam” as he called it. It was used to create a 2 second, 60 frame, scene of a pitch being thrown. The resulting shot was a little choppy but novel.
Is there a video of this somewhere?
I really don't know. There are a few pieces that Pinnacle did on YouTube — the "pinball machine" ABC Monday Night Football open, for example — but it seems most did not survive or are not publicly available.
EDIT: Turns out that the director, Gerry Cook, has a youtube channel with quite a bit of his work shown there. In particular, there is a Heck Yes Productions demo reel, where at 1:50, there is a ring cam shot of a girl jumping rope. It is very similar to the ABC Baseball ring shot but done in the weeks following the baseball shot.
Re: There oughta be a bullet time video booth
#106(self plug)
If you want to obtain the same effect with way less cameras, 4 maybe, check the paper 'Real-Time Depth Video-Based Rendering for 6-DoF HMD Navigation and Light Field Displays' (Bonatto 2021)[0], the supplementary material contains the video view synthesis [1]and some results can be found on YouTube [2] and finally..
You can do the view synthesis for free using the (MPEG) free software: RVS (reference view synthesizer) [3].
[0] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9590541
[1] https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/ielx7/6287639/9312710/9590541/ac...
Re: There oughta be a bullet time video booth
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there a video of this somewhere?
I really don't know. There are a few pieces that Pinnacle did on YouTube — the "pinball machine" ABC Monday Night Football open, for example — but it seems most did not survive or are not publicly available. EDIT: Turns out that the director, Gerry Cook, has a youtube channel with quite a bit of his work shown there. In particular, there is a Heck Yes Productions demo reel, where at 1:50, there is a ring cam shot of…
That’s an amazing shot and an impressive find too, thanks for sharing!
Re: There oughta be a bullet time video booth
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m sitting in a hotel room before a wedding I’m going to photograph and I just laughed at this. Back when they were popular? (Practically?) Every new camera coming out is mirrorless. Every pro is moving to mirrorless. It won’t be all that long before you can’t even buy a new DSLR. Canon, Sony, and Nikon all have their own mount just as they always have. Canon and Nikon took the opportunity to make theirs larger/bett…
Why is mirrorless so popular? I haven't used one lately, but ten years ago the delay between seeing the image and capturing it was so great that it made them useless for people photography (unless people are posing, but I like to capture real emotions as they are happening). Are they better now? In my experience, the shutter lag must be close to 0 to be able to capture the right facial expression. Lag ruins pictures.
Ten years ago is a long time when it comes to camera tech.
I'm very sensitive to lag to the point where I couldn't play Smash Bros on a friend's TV that he insisted was fine. I'm not sure what the actual numbers are but the EVF latency is for all practical purposes imperceptible, and the cameras can shoot much faster bursts to boot.
Plus, people tend to change their expressions when a shutter/mirror is clacking away and mirrorless cameras can be silent.
Re: There oughta be a bullet time video booth
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’m sitting in a hotel room before a wedding I’m going to photograph and I just laughed at this. Back when they were popular? (Practically?) Every new camera coming out is mirrorless. Every pro is moving to mirrorless. It won’t be all that long before you can’t even buy a new DSLR. Canon, Sony, and Nikon all have their own mount just as they always have. Canon and Nikon took the opportunity to make theirs larger/bett…
Why is mirrorless so popular? I haven't used one lately, but ten years ago the delay between seeing the image and capturing it was so great that it made them useless for people photography (unless people are posing, but I like to capture real emotions as they are happening). Are they better now? In my experience, the shutter lag must be close to 0 to be able to capture the right facial expression. Lag ruins pictures.
Even the best mechanical shutters and mirrors in DSLRs have lag too, there is a delay between button press and capture - the relatively large mirror can't defeat physics and move in an instant - the latest mirrorless models are generally competitive now with the ultra-short lag time of the best DSLRs.
DSLRs are worse for capturing the right facial expression in some ways too, because the mirror flip temporarily blocks the viewfinder. With an electronic shutter enabled, a wedding photographer on mirrorless will never have the viewfinder blackout during burst shots when trying to capture "the moment". The mirror/shutterbox puts the "real" world lag on many DSLRs in the 60-120ms range, which is not so hard for an electronic viewfinder to get competitive with.
Mirrorless models with electronic shutters in theory also have the option to continually "precapture" and then use an image from say 100ms ago when button pressed - the iPhone does this to reduce lag time even more, and try to eliminate human response time from the process. A DSLR can only do this concept if the mirror was up blocking the view finder.
While people assume that there is a degree of "WYSIWYG" with the mirror, this isn't always 100% true either. Cheaper/small prisms or pentamirrors result in much dimmer and smaller viewfinders than a good electronic viewfinder, especially on APS-C sized sensors, and 100 percent view coverage is rare outside of high end ones. AFAIK all electronic viewfinders to date are generally 100 percent coverage, and often bigger.
One enormous benefit for wedding/event photographers that mirror elimination accomplishes is making the camera silent. A high end DSLR operating at its highest burst speed is very noisy as the mirror slaps back and forth, which genuinely can be problematic in quiet or intimate settings. The mirror boxes also generally are only good for typically 100-150k activations, which lasts a long time, but they can wear out.
Re: There oughta be a bullet time video booth
#110Just saw a service on the weekend that rents out for events with a setup to take fun shots like this. Assume it's more common than this might say. Kind of an update to the 'photo booth' trend.