A Monster of a Camera

I thought I share one aspect of my work which I don’t usually talk so much about and that is commis­sioned R&D and consulting. For obvious reasons — usually client is paying for your input and they would not be happy if you gave that away for free to a competitor.

But, in this case I think there is no danger — actually, I am hoping that by posting this I might get some useful feedback or links which might then in turn be a benefit to the final product — and the client. I’ve said before that I am a great believer in sharing and somebody taking it further — to every­body’s benefit. Not copying, but taking it further.

Anyway, to cut a long story short: the camera rigging you see above is a prototype, set in our livingroom on a sturdy carbon­fibre tripod and a Gitzo head. It has four Canon 5D mk2’s rigged on a watercut aluminum plate on a form of an arch, each set on a very flat Gitzo underplate. Covering together a total FOV of c. 130° they are linked with a shared timing system so that you can fire them precisely at the same time.

The result: still, (HDR) timelapse or video. Still images are a piece of cake — you could establish that with just one cam (without any parallax issues). Timelapse is a bit more challenging, but as it is a collection of still images turned into video, no real technical challenge there. Well, except that the resulting video might have a resolution of c. 24 000 px horizontal… you need quite a set of computers to process that — but that’s just raw power ‑no big deal. But the video is the most interesting: horizontal resolution of c. 7000 px.… I mean, we are talking two 4K REDs set side by side here. Huge, huge file. Never , ever seen anything like it. Each cam producing full HD quality, we have four of them side by side.

OK, I hear it: “Where in the hell you are going to publish that?” Well, actually… the place does not exist yet… But it will in two years time. Here in Finland — but I cannot say no more. What I can say at this stage is that the projection plane is 18x3.5 meters large, i.e. we are talking super, super, super wide (forget 16:9 or CinemaScope 2.39:1 — we are talking 6:1 ratio here.…) i.e. a partial panorama on a cylindrical projection.

Does it work? You bet. Did some test shooting earlier this year and I’ve seen it projected. Pretty impressive. And yes, obviously, this is a team effort: I won’t say a word about the projection solutions, software needed for video stiching or anything else which is not my turf — mainly because it’s over my head. My respon­si­bility is the cameras and their operation. But there are some smart and experienced people working on this so I am really looking forward to see what gets cooked up in the end.

But — as we stand now — more stuff to test, some final issues to resolve, maybe more testing…

I just thought this monster of a cam looked kind of impressive…

So basically, I guess you could call this post a teaser? :-)