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Creating experimental bullet-time footage with 15 Raspberry Pi cameras

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While the name Eric Paré might be very familiar on here for those who do light painting, many readers of this site might not know about his other activities with Xangle, often involving many cameras for shooting full 360° bullet-time sequences and capturing light paintings from every angle all at once. He’s even developed his own software for it, which you can buy.

Eric likes to experiment with his kit, and as he had a stack of Raspberry Pi 3B+ with cameras lying around, he decided to see how far he could push them to shoot bullet time, and the results are pretty awesome.

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That’s Not A Bullettime Rig, That’s A Bullettime Rig

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If you never saw the 80’s classic called Crocodile Dundee you should treat yourself to an immersive experience. For me the highlight of the movie was always the knife scene (shown below). And this is exactly what I felt Carnegie Mellon’s is telling the world when showing off their 510 camera ‘bullet time’ Panoptic Studio.

The studio is built inside a geodesic dome with 480 camera placed on boards – 24 boards with 20 cameras each -in strategic locations. It has an additional 30 cameras and depth sensors to which enables the operators to record and track an almost perfect 360 degrees view of whatever is happening inside of it.

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Orcavue Creates Bullet Time Shots With One Camera

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Remember how revolutionary that bullet shot in the matrix was? It was also a few dozens cameras, a full-scale Chroma room and a budget that would probably be enough for a mid-sized indie film. But the effect is totally worth it.

I guess this is why we are seeing so many creative ways of recreating this effect, from crowd-sourcing, to using “cheap” GoPros (or even RASPBERRY PIs) arrays to using a ceiling fan (really!).

Orcavue took that ceiling fan concept and made it into a product. I guess I can only describe their rig as an upside down biggish ceiling fan with a camera on its arm.

The arm on the Orcavue  revolves at 1-2 revolutions per second, and combined with a high FPS camera – say a 120FPS, $500 GoPro – it can create some cool bullet time effects. The team recommends slowing the camera even further in post (say using Twixtor) to get a really slow shot.

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An Insane Rig Of 50 EOS1DX DSLRs Captures Really Expensive Bullet Time Photos

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We have covered quite a bit of bullet time rigs but even the really high-end ones usually use an array of GoPros which are not the cheapest way to get a good bullet time shot but is it manageable.

A collaboration between Swiss TV station and Swiss Canon upped the game by making a bullet time rig with 50 Canon EOS 1DX DSLRs (yes that’s a 5 followed by a zero). A single one of those bodies is about $6,800 so it totals up to roughly $340,000. Oh yea, they needed lenses too. Weapon of choice was Canon’s top notch 24-70mm f/2.8L II USM. Those roughly cost $2,100 a lens. So we are looking at an additional $105,000 of lenses, bringing the total (with some memory cards, cables and 50 bubble levels) to just about half a million Dollar’s worth of gear.

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How X-Men: Days of Future Past Quicksilver’s incredible Slow-Mo Sequance Was Made

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Have you seen X-Men: Days of Future Past yet? Even if you are not into science fiction that much, this is a wonderful movie to start with. It has a strong plot, good character building and (ok…) some mutants going back and forward in time…. (Ok, I’m a fanboy)

One of the most notable scenes in the movie has to do with a mutant called Quicksilver’s (Evan Peters). He is Marvel’s twin of DC Flash meaning he can move really, really fast. So fast actually, that it almost looks like bullet time…

In that specific scene Quicksilver has to get himself, Magneto, Wolverine and prof. Xavier out of a maximum security facility. Of course, this was the perfect chance to have some fun so Quicksilver knocks the hats off the security, makes them slap each other and tastes some of the food that is flying around. Wait a second.. Bullet Time? It may be quite interesting to see how they shot it.

Interestingly, it did not involve an array of cameras but a ton of CGI and a few huge fans instead.

[via wired]

Slow Life Is a 150,000 Photos Mesmerizing Underwater Timelapse

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If you thought that shooting underwater is hard, wait until you hear about this macro-stacking-150,000-photos timelapse project.

Daniel Stoupin is a marine biology PHD student in Queensland. This obviously gives him a lot of material to shoot in his other job as an underwater videographer. Slow life in particular combines both his loves -marine life and underwater photography.[Read More…]

This Amazing Stickbomb Bullet Time Sequence Uses Over 30,000 Stickbombs

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When you want to create an awesome car chase and don’t have the budget for it, you can always scale it down, and use RC cars. Of course, that does not mean that budget is frugal, it simply means that some stuff can not be done full scale.

The Subaru team created this incredible SUBARU “WRX STI vs StickBomb” sequence, which features a remote controlled Subaru WRX STI going through a miniature racing track battling a wave of Stick bombs. Some of the high moments of the clip feature a bullet time sequence made with an array of over 25 gopros, while the rest of the footage was shot on some highend cameras, cranes, and stabilizers.[Read More…]

Bullet Time With Lots And Lots Of Raspberry Pis

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We have shared many bullet time tutorials over the years, from high end, through crowd sourced to pinhole driven. This time I am happy to share a build made solely on Raspberry Pi and the Raspberry Pi camera module.

The folks at PiFace, a company that wants kids to program again, came up with this insane 48 Raspberry Pis bullet time rig.[Read More…]

Realtime Bullettime Effect Coming Soon To A Boxing Ring Near You

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I love a good time freezing Bullettime effect. And we have shared quite a few rigs on the blog. All with varying degrees of sophistication and effort. From a LO-FI pinhole rig, through a crowd funded version to a high end light painting 360 rig. And quite a few others too.

They all had one thing in common, after taking the footage with the multi-camera rig needed a significant amount of post processing time to create the bullet time effect, making it practically unfitted for live event coverage. [Read More…]

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