Hi,

Hope everyone is doing fine. I came across this trailer and saw this cool effect and thought to myself how they achieved it. I've concluded the following

-Either it is a greenscreen effect, with a still image in the background
- or the same screen shot twice and edited around with

Any insight would be greatly appreciated.

the link is below

http://www.widei-films.com/frame.php

click on projects, scroll to the bottom, television.
it is called Guide to Islam, BBC documentary.

Thanks for taking the time to read this post

Ismail

Isn't that just matrix style lining up of still cams in a row and having them fire off at the same time then stitching it all together to look like a dolly shot? You can even have them fire off in sequence and give it a slow-mo effect if you wanted... requires a poop load of still cams but very creative for whoever first thought of it... no matter how over used it is.

Ive heard of this technique before, can anyone confirm this? So i guess theres no alternative?

Ive heard of this technique before, can anyone confirm this? So i guess theres no alternative?
I am pretty sure this is what they did. An alternative would be to get everyone to stand very very still. lol

ok, i agree. What about the presenter who speaks in the video? is he greenscreen?

Yeah, must be. I think they shot the background with those cameras, then put him in front of a greenscreen with the footage behind him.

any links or suggestions for anyone who may have tried out this technique?
how many cameras is one expected to use in the shot

no experience but figure it's as many cams as frames you want on the move... one thing you could do is go film the move with your camera.. then see how many frames it took to make that movie.... if you want it to be *that* smooth then you need that many cams... you could reduce the cams but you would reduce the smoothness... you can also simulate what this would look like (to a point) by reducing your frame rate on that test move... much better if you can film with progressive vs interlace and still the "motion blur" might mess with it... but it should give you the overall look.... OR you could just calculate how many seconds you want the move to take and then divide that by your min. frame rate you want ;)

it seems it is a very low quality bullet time effect.
It means there are very few pictures taken and lot of morphing done to generate the missing frames.
I think 10 pictures is the maximum used in the sample.
you can do it for cheap with disposable film camera or low cost digital camera.
http://www.chinavasion.com/index.php/cName/digital-cameras-13-to-20-mp-digital-cameras/

Here's an article on it:
http://graphics.stanford.edu/projects/array/

yes it is an array of cameras or a new technique

It looks to me that they took a digitial still first of the people and then cut them out of the background and made them into 3d layers in AE. They could greenscreen the actor in, but could also film it on location, but that would be much more difficult. You can see something similar in a couple shots in my friends demo. He used all stills, but it's just another step to add video over top, given you do a good setup on your green screen, camera angles, etc.

http://www.ehrichs.net/Video_Effects_Demo__Joshua_Bromer.mpg

it seems to me that greenscreen is the only way to acheive this.
green screen is so critical thouogh for good lighting and a good screen.
alsodepends on your software

The sample footage is done by greenscreening the "host" but the stuff in the background is clearly matrix style "arrays"... it's not stills because the camera clearly moves.. the objects aren't "flat".

The sample footage is done by greenscreening the "host" but the stuff in the background is clearly matrix style "arrays"... it's not stills because the camera clearly moves.. the objects aren't "flat".


What do you mean they're not flat? They don't change perspective at all when the camera moves.

What do you mean they're not flat? They don't change perspective at all when the camera moves.

Watch the lady who has her arm in the air.. you can see "around" her arm as the camera pivots.

I agree that doing it with flat pics looks impressive but this isn't done like that.

you can pick up N90s' on the cheap these days which is what they used on the original Matrix array...

Paul

The person walking while everything else is still is comped in front of the frozen scene using greenscreen.

Some of these frozen scenes are far enough beyond the point the camera is pivoting around to have been possible by stitching still images together, but it looks like they were mostly shot with camera arrays anyway.

There's a pretty extensive discussion of the effect in this thread:
http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=60334

Here's a great article and podcast interview about how Mark Ruff achieves this effect with near realtime results using arrays of Canon 10D cameras, each linked to their own macmini:
http://www.fxguide.com/article323.html

Mark's site is http://www.ruffy.com

Have fun.

It looks like two videos where the 1st is frozen because look at the guy running, he is consistantly blurred.

just my guess

http://www.framefree.com/

can be used to morph frames together.

PRetty killer results can be seen on their web site.