Create Your Own Bullet Time Camera Rig With Raspberry Pi 88
sfcrazy writes "A team of extremely creative people have created a really inexpensive bullet time set-up using Raspberry Pis — and the whole set-up costs less than a professional DSLR camera. The rig looks more like the LHC at CERN using nearly half a kilometre of network cables, 48 Raspberry Pis fitted with cameras and PiFace Control. The rig worked perfectly — in terms of doing what a bullet time set-up should do. Raspberry Pis achieved the Hollywood's 'frozen time' effect at a much lesser cost."
Previous art from 1985 (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Affect/effect (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think you get it -- each station has a ~$40 RPi-B, a ~$30 5MPx camera module, and a ~$30 LCD+buttons board (which AFAICT serves no actual purpose in this project, but is the product being sold by the people who put this project together to promote that product, so it kinda has to be in there).
You'd use an AVR/PIC at each station to control a point-and-shoot digital camera -- and a $40 RPi would be insane in that role. In this case, they're using the RPi not to control a standalone camera, but to be the mainboard of a digital camera. Depending on the smarts present in that camera module, and particularly on how slow a data rate it's capable of speaking, an AVR/PIC might be able to handle this, but it would be some heavy lifting. From that perspective, it almost makes sense -- if only a CHDK-capable P&S weren't basically the same price and a whole lot more featureful.
Creative? (Score:3, Insightful)
A team of extremely creative people
Extremely creative? Not really.
Raspberry Pis achieved the Hollywood's 'frozen time' effect at a much lesser cost.
And much lower quality! And without doing any of the time consuming post-processing that's required for an actual film!
I still think it's cool - or I expect I would if the site was working - but go easy on the hyperbole.