Bullet Point Photography (Matrix sort of thing)

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da8iwr

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First of all i would just like to say hi there, as this is my first post on this forum :)

For the past 10 years i have been producing QTVR movies and 3D animations. For the QTVR stuff i use my lovely 5D with a Nikon 10.5mm lens using an adapter plate. But my client is after some completely different.

He has asked for a Matrix style photo shoot. I have no problem taking the images, setting the cameras up, or even the post processing and exporting it as a Flash movie. But do have trouble in finding the right cameras within the budget.

I need the cameras to have
  • Manual exposure/shutter speed
  • Manual white balance
  • Remote shutter release (prefer IR remote)
  • Tripod thread hole in the bottom of it
  • Take the image as fast as possible from when press it to go.
  • Not bothered if it is compact or DSLR, as long as it works.
  • Maximum image is for screen resolution, so almost any Mega pixel size will do, it will prob be heavily photoshoped anway.
I was in Jacobs on Friday, and we got to the Pentax L20. When i was in the shop, it seamed perfect, and about the kind of budget i was looking for of almost £100 or less each.

Only problem is i found only one review on the net, and it said that it can take up to 3 secs to take a photo. Well for this job, it needs to be perfect and take the image exactly when i want it to.

I plan on buying between 30 and 50 of these (depending on costs), and if they all take at slightly different times, then the illusion will be lost.

Has any body any other suggestions of cameras, the cheaper they are, the more i can get to make the movie smoother.

Many thanks
Ian
 
As far as I know no compact camera will take a shot 'instantly' although 3 seconds seems very long (I reckon the camera must have been hunting for focus or something) 1/2 a second even up to 1 second is not unusual.

If you want better you are going to have to spend the cash on SLR type kit. You might be able to hire some though depending where you are, Calumet are one company that will do this.

/edit P.S. hi :)
 
If you add manual focus to your list then I think you would take away most of the delay problems. Try it with the Oly 5050 in your sig - that does manual focus.

And Hello :)
 
Would loads of cheapish DV cams not work? Then you could cut out the frames you needed for the bullet time, but it would also allow you to go backwards and forwards in time along the camera path as you wished, as you would have frames from all the capture points at all the time intervals rather than one frame from each capture point.
 
Hi thanks for those replies.

Yerp i have tried my Olyp camedia cameras, and your right, it is the autofocus which takes up 99% of the shutter time. The one main thing i notice, is that if you press the shutter to position one on my Olym, and hold it there, it sets the cameras right so as you press the shutter to position 2, it takes almost instantly.

I did actually think about using the video part of this pentax, to get the video as Messiah Khan suggested. But as i haven't tested the quality of the video yet, i didn't think it would be good enough image quality to be used as a still after.

You see the only compacts i have ever tried are the Olyp Camedias, as they match a tripod rig i have and software for Virtual tours, which is why i have a few.

Does anybody know of any other compacts, or are they going to be pretty much the same?
 
I have no idea if it would be any good for your needs, im just throwing ideas around, but a quick search reveals;

http://www.paramountzone.com/dv8000.htm
Its a HD-DV cam that can do 4 mega-pixel for video shots. And it only costs £139.95. If you can infact get the quality you require from a DV camera, then I think this would be a more flexible route. Out of interest, how were you going to trigger all of the cameras from IR remotes in sequence?
 
If you can stretch your budget I'm sure you can pick up loads of canon 300Ds with kit lenses for around the £200 mark, giving you much better control. You would recoup most of your money selling them on after the job too.

Suppose it would take a bit of work though to actually get 30 or so 300d's second hand.
 
Have you had a look at some interpolation software? A friend of mine did this type of effect a few years back with less cameras and rendering the extra frames for the pan in software... then you could use better quality cameras :D

Half decent camcorders with a true progressive capture mode would be a good solution.

QTVR's frame rate and quality is suitably low that this won't make much difference...
 
Yes we are looking into Morphing software, to try and miss out 2 cameras in each jump.

So it will go something like

Real image - Morphed - Morphed - Real - Morphed
and so on

This means with about 30 cameras, in theory we will get about 90 images or so.

I did think about the 20 or 30D SLR range, but thought it may end up being more hassle than it is worth, especially being second hand and checking them all to make sure there are no pixel or mechanical problems that will make the image slightly different form the next. I even thought of hiring them, but haven't researched that to find the cost, and a supplier with that many cameras. I think if i bought them all new, form the same batch, the chance of getting different images from them, will be reduced, but prob not removed.

As i cant imagine them being calibrated when they leave the factory.

I would prefer to keep the cameras, as once this is all set up (which will take days and days of test shots), i would prefer to leave them all set up for future jobs. But selling them on eBay is an option i have thought about to try and get as much money back as possible.
 
Trouble is basically you are trying to achieve what is a multi-million dollar technique with a budget that is errrm a little light.... sorry if that sounds a bit harsh.
 
desantnik said:
Trouble is basically you are trying to achieve what is a multi-million dollar technique with a budget that is errrm a little light.... sorry if that sounds a bit harsh.
Click to expand...

No thats not harsh, its the truth.

I have a budget of about £3K for all the equpiment, which is a drop in the ocean for what i really should be spending. But the idea is, just to make my client happy, and make the best of what i can.

Thats why im looking for help, as i dont think its a problem with the technique or skill, its the equipment thats going to drag me behind.
 
Assuming they have the availability, you could rent 30 20D's and 30 50mm f/1.4 for £2820 inc. VAT.

That price is for a single day and doesn't include insurance :eek:

If you can claim the VAT back then the cost drops to £2400.

You still have the problem of triggering all 30 cameras at once, but the 20D does have 5fps, so you might be able to get some time progression into the shot?

All in all though, it sounds like you need a bigger budget, or a lot lower standards.

HTH
 
Thanks Chris

Your right i think the standards i am going for are pretty low in quality, as at the absolute most in going to require in quality is about 1280x720 (high Def TV in case it is used for a DVD later on) which even a crappy camera phone could do. But obviously the higher quality, the better.

I think the Pentax would be ideal, I'm just really worried about the trigger time, i think I'm going to buy one this week and just have a play with and see what the real score is.

I would love to hire, but i think its going to take much more than a day, for example we need to set up and do a load of test shots to make sure we have all the cameras facing the correct way, then position it in the club, and take sets, and then a few days later when it is being used for another purpose, such as corp event, or private function.

So with this in mind i think financially we will be miles away from my budget if i hired cameras, as i think the minimum time scale i need is about a week.

I think if i bought a load, i could put it down to tax loss, and then sell them privately on eBay and get the money back out f the business, so i suppose its a bit of money laundering lol.
 
I know this is an old thread, but i was just wanting to post an update as i forgot this thread was here.

http://www.newworlddesigns.co.uk/portfolio/rodnik-london-fashion-show-2008-video.html

Eventually after a lot of development and research, we have produced some great shots. Not superb but great.

The time it takes to do one of these shots is incredible, about 2 days to set up and for every time you press the shutter, it takes about 4 hours in post production.

All the best
Ian
 
Just an expanded answer on my last post there...

In April 07 i started this project, to make bullet time photography. We bought 36 Samsung GX1S lens kits, which is a Pentax *ist DS2 re-branded.

I then commissioned a trigger system to be developed which cost me an arm and a leg, but it gave me accuracy of about 1 billionth of a second between when each of the cameras being fired with an option of putting a slight time delay between them of anywhere between 0.001 and 0.5 seconds to make the appearance of the cameras running along a time line.

We started to take many test shoots last autumn and found the samsung cameras were no good at all, the way the cameras were wired up inside was extremely complicated and messed up. Basically Pentax and samsung cameras shutter release isn't a constant power supply, it is on for 0.5 seconds and then off for 0.5 seconds. So as you press fire, some of the shutters were actually off, and the camera would wait upt o 0.5 seconds to come back on and then fire, which is a life time in a movement shot. This cost us about £5000 worth of cameras to figure out. We then achieved a major contract which just a say paid for a new set of cameras, so we bought 16 x canon 450D cameras and lenses had a little software developed that allowed the images to come down to a laptop as your firing, but we found that no software was able to fire all the cameras at once, as USB has too much time lag, so we had to modify the trigger system we already had to suit the canons.

Finally we now had a rig that would fire instantly, and correctly.

The last shoot we did was last month using Kino flow strip constant lighting, 16 x 450D cameras, and a huge walk in cylinder we made up with poly boards to mask out everything else in the room for ease in post production.

You can see the results in the link in my last post above :)

If you want to try this by the way, your looking at bills of up and over £30K, which you could also use to buy a lovely M5 BMW and insure it for a year.

I'm not sure if that would have been a better idea or not ;)
 
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