[HN Gopher] There oughta be a bullet time video booth
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There oughta be a bullet time video booth
Author : _Microft
Score : 189 points
Date : 2023-05-26 17:33 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (there.oughta.be)
(TXT) w3m dump (there.oughta.be)
| travbrack wrote:
| This exists. https://bigfreeze.com/projects - They have one at
| the Pacific Science Center in Seattle: https://podcam.net/pacsci/
| albroland wrote:
| There already is a company that rents out a system like this
| called the A-1 Array: https://www.array.cam/
|
| I first saw this at an art installation in Brooklyn in 2017.
| tootie wrote:
| We leased this one for a few months for a project. It works
| pretty well. We priced several competitors too. There's not a
| ton but there's a few.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| That subtends a much lower angle. Also the "acceleration" and
| alternating mirroring in TFA to give the illusion of a 180
| degree spin is a brilliant idea.
| danielvf wrote:
| Here's a cutting edge modern take using GoPros and NeRF
| techniques.
|
| https://twitter.com/Arata_Fukoe/status/1660980297352224769
| Wistar wrote:
| Pinnacle 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 360deg 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.
| PicassoCTs wrote:
| Could this be done with a drone swarm? Every drone follows a
| spline, the cameras synced on a target?
| jbverschoor wrote:
| There was one of the Witcher on comicon a few years ago
| lostgame wrote:
| During the Pride festival in Toronto last year I swear they
| actually had something like this!
|
| I fully remember I left for the bathroom and came back to my
| girlfriend and her bestie doing it, it was like you stood in the
| Center of the platform and the cameras rotated around or
| something?
|
| I wish I could remember it more specifically, and it wasn't
| perfect; but it struck me as strange that this was the first time
| I'd actually seen anyone even try!
|
| Wish now I'd written down the company who was putting it on. It
| looked neat. :)
| thih9 wrote:
| Related topic, wiggle stereoscopy:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiggle_stereoscopy
|
| And there was a lens for this kind of effect, it allowed
| capturing three images at once [1] [2].
|
| There were also dedicated cameras [3].
|
| > Using its four lenses, four images from slightly different
| viewing angles were taken simultaneously. With the individual
| images half the size of the usual 35mm image frames, each 3D
| photograph taken used the space of 2 full 35mm exposures on the
| film. So a roll labeled as "36 exposures" would yield 18 3D
| pictures with four images each.
|
| [1]: https://www.dpreview.com/news/1238704821/this-3d-printed-
| len...
|
| [2]: https://www.georgemoua.com/store/d9000-fe-3d-stereoscopic-
| wi...
|
| [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nimslo
| jaywalk wrote:
| This type of photo/video booth is widely available for rental
| these days.
| spuz wrote:
| I just looked them up and you are right. It varies from 5
| cameras to hundreds of cameras. Interestingly though, I haven't
| seen any of them demo the continuous rotation through a wall
| effect that Sebastian shows here though which kind of makes the
| professional solutions feel like they have some room for
| improvement.
| internetter wrote:
| I'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
| estebank wrote:
| The project already used frame interpolation (through DaVinci
| Resolve) to double the number of frames in the video. Plus a
| low-tech "inside the wall" panned and blurred frame. Given the
| set-up, fancier scene reconstruction to build a 3D model of the
| environment could be combined with texture reprojection to
| improve the interpolation and allow the "inside the wall" frame
| to be perspective corrected, but that would be much more
| involved on the software side than what was done here (and
| beyond what I could do too).
| zoogeny wrote:
| The tech to look out for in this space is called NeRF (Neural
| Radiance Fields).
|
| Just do a quick search on that term and you will find a whole
| bunch of videos that reconstruct 3d scenes using digital
| stills. I just saw a paper a couple of days ago showing
| advances in reconstructing human expressions that change over
| time using advanced techniques.
| riotnrrd wrote:
| Yeah, the Frugal Man's Bullet-time is a DSLR, Instant NGP
| from NVIDIA, and COLMAP.
| kersplody wrote:
| The challenge here is cost. You need 20-40 perspectives at ~$1000
| bucks each including the camera body, lens, trigger system,
| remote download, and output pipeline. So a hand built cost
| optimized system will cost $20k - $40k in hardware. Operating is
| also kinda painful: calibration of each camera is required every
| time the rig is moved or exposure is adjusted and all shots must
| be designed ahead of time. It's just kinda a limited market due
| to the complexity and cost.
|
| Neural Holography should arrive to market within the the next 6
| months, which will allow for any frame to be seen at any angle
| with as few as 20 cameras for 360deg x 180deg coverage, allowing
| for bullet time shots to be designed after the fact with the
| added bonus of having cinematic quality 3D live action content
| for use in VR and other 3D environments.
| fsckboy wrote:
| this is the "bullet time" effect (in the Matrix, when Trinity
| karate-jump-kicks and rotates in air)
| https://www.factinate.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/trinity...
|
| This camera setup for personal social events is a great idea, I
| wonder if it could be done with some sort of phone app so among a
| group of friends or at a party you could use everybody's cell
| phone.
|
| in watching the video though, I found it a little disappointing.
| I think people need help with choreography, what actions and
| timing are going to make for good shifts in perspective. For
| example, you want grandma to rotate in mid air, not something she
| throws up. Another example, I think you want the action to start
| from the periphery, and then bring the characters in the shot
| "into the spotlight" so the clip delivers a climax or "keeps
| getting better". (although, he did use the "move away from the
| action" technique to good effect to create transition places to
| stitch together a series of clips into a sequence
| https://there.oughta.be/assets/images/2023-05-26/demo-blog.m... )
|
| And could it be done using video instead of still shots? seems
| like turning raw footage into something interesting would be
| easier? Or is that how it works anyway?
| thedougd wrote:
| A similar effect is achieved with a platform and a camera on an
| arm rapidly rotating around the platform. I've seen it at tech
| conferences.
|
| I think this is it:
|
| https://spinpix360.com/
| [deleted]
| inconceivable wrote:
| this is interesting but it doesn't have the time freeze or slo
| mo effect done with a rapid series of photos.
| thedougd wrote:
| Not a total freeze, but it had slow motion. I thought it was
| a clever approximation. You can see it here:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXhlfWOl0_Y&t=50
|
| Not quite as many radians without the subject moving as you
| would with the real thing.
| qup wrote:
| Seems a good place to ask: anyone know a good tutorial for
| building your own diy photo booth?
| internetter wrote:
| I quite like this one. It's crafty and cute
| https://hackaday.com/2019/12/22/build-a-dslr-photo-booth-
| the..., though there's no printing.
|
| It's not abundantly hard to bang together something functional,
| really. It's one of those projects where you just think about
| the components you have (Camera, Monitor), and then make an
| enclosure (or find 3d/laser files), then some code that's
| surely on github to sync them together.
| lostgame wrote:
| A small printer, though; would turn it from a novelty into
| something you could e.g. install in a store you owned, and
| even if you just charged a buck a go it could still be a fun
| draw.
|
| Got me thinking now what a tiny printing solution like that
| would/could look like!
|
| EDIT: unsurprisingly, there's a bunch of iOS/iPadOS
| solutions. You could theoretically base it off a custom app
| on an iPad with one of these iThing printers stuffed away and
| use Square as a POS?
| Animats wrote:
| He'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?
| zh3 wrote:
| 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).
| Galaxeblaffer wrote:
| define good camera.
|
| it's a bit weird because it often turns out that cameras with
| user interfaces are cheaper because of economy of scales. that
| being said, a market for almost barbone sensors on pcb's seems
| to be building and is lead by raspberry pi's camera modules,
| where the hq module has a reasonably sized sensor but is still
| a far cry from mft, aps-c and full frame sizes. the hq camera
| is almost on parity with most phones. from there it pretty much
| moves into cameras with ui's but controllable with some kind of
| vendor sdk or libgphoto. i imagine it's a matter of economy of
| scale and it's almost impossible to buy a good almost barbone
| sensor. If it's even possible e.g. the 61mp ff sensor used in
| the Sony a7rV is available almost barbone for astro
| photography, it's still very expensive. i imagine there's a
| pretty big market for all kinds of industrial cameras but from
| tip toeing into that, it seems very very very expensive.
| Animats wrote:
| Yes, this is related to the complaint that webcams tend to be
| lousy cameras, for no good reason.
| michaelgiba wrote:
| NeRF + a few cameras in an array could probably get you there
| jcelerier wrote:
| > In case you never heard of it: The bullet time effect was
| famously introduced with the movie "The Matrix" from 1999.
|
| actually I think one can already see it in this ad from 1996:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbOGJy3P6rA
| stuxnet79 wrote:
| I always assumed this was pioneered by Hong Kong action cinema?
| ziml77 wrote:
| Nice, but aren't the cameras supposed to be triggered in sequence
| instead of all at once? I thought there was still a little bit of
| motion in the movies, but in these the subjects all freeze in
| place.
| noisycarlos wrote:
| That's true if you want them to move slowly like in the movie.
| But to just freeze them you need to take all the pictures at
| the same time
| kersplody wrote:
| You can do that with synchronized video cameras and AI
| inbetweening: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsY0sKH3nG4&t=4s
| moffkalast wrote:
| One would think the cameras all record at the same time and you
| can just pan around and adjust speed whenever?
| dwringer wrote:
| In theory the idea also enables a higher frame rate than that
| of which the cameras are individually capable, thus allowing
| a finer slow motion effect.
| bee_rider wrote:
| A nice compromise (since a wedding photo booth isn't going
| to be super choreographed) could be to group the cameras in
| to, say, two groups. Trigger them periodically, 180 degrees
| out of phase with their neighbors, and assuming the virtual
| camera is moving by one real camera per frame, you've got
| double the frame rate but can still choose a path in post-
| processing. And of course it could easily be abstracted out
| to n camera sets.
|
| This is getting pretty complicated though, he "hard-coded"
| the camera motion into the shape of the frame. Physical
| things are hard, haha.
| rtkwe wrote:
| Depends on the setup you're using the trouble with doing
| video is to get the effect to be smooth you need frames at
| very particular times from each location which is tough to
| ensure out of video equipment where a bank of cameras you can
| trigger to take a single frame in sequence. To do the same
| with video you need to have a system to send a slightly out
| of phase sync signal to each camera in the array or just wing
| it and fudge the jittery motion and ramping with some VFX in
| post production.
| whoisthis4chan wrote:
| yes. in the special edition DVD, the special features show the
| bullet time scene in the studio and you can hear the shutters
| from the camera clacking like dry fire from an automatic rifle
| _Microft wrote:
| Technically yes but since the resulting bullet time sequence is
| really short, it won't make much of a difference, I think.
| unfunco wrote:
| I went to the Monza F1 GP in 2019 and they had a bullet-time
| video tent sort of thing, with a trampoline in the middle if I
| remember correctly, it was free to use in the fan zone.
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| That camera had an MSRP of $899 when it was new in 2006 [0].
| Amazing that they now sell for only PS50, 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...
| TrainedMonkey wrote:
| Even more impressive when you account for 50% USD inflation
| since 2006: https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/2006
| estebank wrote:
| It is a great moment for people that want to get into
| photography, because the market is moving to mirrorless but
| there's plenty of old high end DSLR gear that people are
| getting rid of but that can produce excellent pictures. The
| important part of the gear is the lenses, and those can be had
| used for a fraction of the cost of new ones. For the bodies,
| the sensor quality has consistently improved over the years,
| but the quality of 35mm at ISO 100 has been matched and
| surpassed a long time ago. As a first approximation, you can
| say that about 10 Megapixels are enough to match film[1].
| Subjectively you could say that digital matches and exceeds
| film since around the mid-2000s.[2] Anything newer than the D2
| will be more than enough for any hobbyist. The subsets of
| photography that benefit from the improvements of the past two
| decades are low light photography (birding), sports (if you can
| shoot 9fps and the pal next to you can shoot 11fps, they are
| the ones more likely to get paid for the picture) and
| videography (both due to quality of the recorded video as well
| as ease of use, like better auto-focus).
|
| [1]: https://photo.stackexchange.com/questions/30745/what-is-
| the-...
|
| [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThpQWhOfKO4
| bentcorner wrote:
| For anyone who is interested in older cameras I use a Canon
| Rebel T3i as a webcam and it works fantastically. In 2020
| because of you-know-what Canon released a webcam driver for a
| bunch of their cameras and the T3i is one of the oldest ones
| supported (the most recent version of their driver drops
| support for this camera but older drivers work just fine).
|
| Paired with an AC power adapter and a mount for my monitor it's
| a nice webcam. I bought a 24mm lens for it that was reasonably
| affordable and I get a nice "real" bokeh effect in my
| background (it's not as blurry as the computational one but
| it's a nice to have). (FWIW I also push it through OBS to crop
| it).
| giobox wrote:
| Mileage varies between cameras, but one small warning to
| anyone considering this if they spend even a couple of hours
| a day in meetings with the camera on from time to time - the
| sensors in some DSLRs/mirrorless models can overheat while
| live streaming and your video will cut out.
|
| Most of them were only specced to record up to 30 minute
| clips at a time in original guise and are passively cooled,
| so running for an hr or more can push the sensors beyond
| their original specifications etc. I've had this happen
| rarely with some m43 cameras I use as webcams via an HDMI
| capture card. There's a ton of youtube videos on this topic
| with all sorts of homemade cooling setups:
|
| > https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1IMSWWccQwQ
| nyjah wrote:
| I have a canon r6 and I cannot for the life of me get the
| webcam utility to work. The camera utilities work just fine.
| I can even remote shoot from my pc. But I have not been able
| to get the webcam utility to work. The support around fixing
| it that I have found does not fix the problem, but is always
| suggested is to turn off the camera utility software but
| again, I've tried that and many other things and can't seem
| to crack the code..
| bentcorner wrote:
| I don't have any expertise in this area other than offering
| the 1.1 driver I used: https://canon.ca/en/Features/EOS-
| Webcam-Utility
|
| While it looks like your camera is supported by both
| versions, maybe you'll have better luck with this one.
| nyjah wrote:
| I appreciate the support. Been down this road too. Same
| result. It's frustrating. Seems there are anomaly cases
| where people run into this issue.
| estebank wrote:
| For anyone that might also already have a Nikon D5100 or
| D7000 to repurpose as a webcam, you can use a custom
| firmware[1] to clean up the HDMI output, an HDMI capture card
| and OBS to fix the aspect ratio. That's the setup I use.
|
| 1: https://nikonhacker.com/wiki/Supported_Models
| dadsquad wrote:
| how do you use this with an AC power adapter? I have one and
| I've used it but I run out of battery quickly. is there a way
| to power the camera with AC??
| orev wrote:
| Most cameras enable using an AC adapter with a dummy
| battery insert that provides a barrel power jack. A quick
| search for that for this camera shows that it seems to be
| the case for this one.
| poyu wrote:
| There's a kind of power cord that has a dummy battery that
| plugs into the mains. The camera's battery door also has a
| hole to run the cable through. Searching for "dummy battery
| $CAMERA_MODEL" would get you what you want
| UniverseHacker wrote:
| Can these really use all of those old 35mm Canon lenses?
| nayuki wrote:
| Yes, the Canon EOS 400D body accepts all EF and EF-S lenses.
| rrreese wrote:
| I use several EF lenses on my Canon mirrorless. They tend to
| focus faster then on the old SLRs (and this is on the EOS-R
| which has the least sophisticated focusing).
|
| They're cheaper but you have to carry an adapter.
| newman8r wrote:
| You could probably set this up at county fairs and charge 20
| bucks a pop. really cool setup.
| _Microft wrote:
| The creator of this is also the person behind Phyphox, an app
| that turns your smartphone into tool to conduct physics
| experiments with and collect data from them, creator of a Game
| Boy WiFi cartridge and GB Interceptor that allows to record
| videos of Game Boy games - among other things. Amazing what
| some people do, isn't it?
|
| https://phyphox.org/
|
| https://github.com/Staacks/wifi-game-boy-cartridge
|
| https://github.com/Staacks/gbinterceptor
| bentcorner wrote:
| Phyphox is such a cool tool. The acceleration spectrogram is
| so cool to look at - you can put your phone top of your
| PC/laptop and measure the RPM of fans and spinning drives.
| thepasswordis wrote:
| This already exists and people rent them out for weddings and
| parties and stuff like that:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qTlpwIhcSHQ
| doctorhandshake wrote:
| Brooklyn's Super A-OK has productized this: https://superaok.com/
| renewiltord wrote:
| This is a bonkers idea! I fucking love it, man! I bet I could do
| this with a single device on a rail and use NeRFs to actually
| make the effect. Could even do more complex camera flight. Love
| the idea.
| weinzierl wrote:
| The Insta360 can do bullet time video with minimal effort. Ok,
| it's no exactly the same as known from Matrix, but considering
| the simplicity it is pretty cool.
| tregoning wrote:
| My poor man version of this (using web tech)
| https://jt.io/posts/bullet-time/
| notRobot wrote:
| This is really cool!
| tomduncalf wrote:
| So cool!
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