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Comment by nixosbestos

13 hours ago

How is the first one done? It seems like the cartons would fall faster than you could manually capture 2-3 images?

(super cool all around, thanks for sharing)

It's tech from the 80s. Look up the Nishika N8000 and Nimslo 3D.

Basically it's multiple lenses next to each other, each capturing a small slice on the 35mm film. Every lens has it's own shutter, which is triggered at exactly the same time.

This wasn't too involved and quite cheap to implement with analog tech in the 80s/90s, but if you want to do the same thing with digital there's quite a bit more to consider. Here's a cool video of someone building a digital stereo camera: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_aofxbH0elo

The hard part with digital boils down to: Cheap camera modules are hard to calibrate to the same parameters and sometimes impossible to set focus, so pictures look the same. And taking pictures takes quite a bit of processing power, so if you want to take 4 pictures at once it gets a bit tricky with just a cheap raspberry or similar.

  • There is also the Fujifilm FinePix REAL 3D which is a 2 lens digital version of the idea. But yeah I do think the analogue grain is doing some heavy lifting on the aesthetic side of the Nishika/Nimslo images.

To add to the other comments if you have the idea to use multiple camera to make the same effect but at a higher quality (and if you somehow sort how the synchronisation problem), then congrats ! You have invented bullet time, as demonstrated 27 years ago* in the Matrix.

*ouch, I feel old

  • >if you somehow sort how the synchronisation problem

    These days you can just capture video and make a 4d Gaussian splat

    • My constraint was a tongue-and-cheek "use as little technology as possible" (like what was available in 1999). I think nowaydays it's still more economical to do one pass of photogrammetry on your talent then do a mocap and actor replacement ?

I believe there have been camera specifically designed for this, where they have multiple horizontally spaced lenses that all take a picture at the same time, or literally just holding several cameras right next to each other and triggering them all at once

I assume more than a single camera or a moving camera with a very high shutter speed with fixed focus.