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Camera Technique Captures New View of Space & Time
kkleiner writes "What if you could compress a video clip into a single image? That's what Jay Mark Johnson, an artist and visual effects director, has accomplished through the use of a special camera technique. He calls the images 'photographic timelines,' and his collected works offer quite a shift to conventional perception. Slices of photos are strung together in progression to make a single composite image of a sliver of space spread over an extended period of time."
"What if you could compress a video clip into a single image? "
you get a GIF.
Pretty sad that it took an $85000 camera to do the same thing you could do with any video camera and a few hundred lines of code...
They have been doing this for years... Go look at the "photo finish" of any horse race to see the same effect.
We already have things that show timeline in images, they are called 'movies', but the pictures that are shown in the linked story do not look like they are actually conveying a time line, they look like they are pieces of different images spliced together somehow, it's not clear how they represent a 'timeline'.
That picture with a woman (or whatever it is) being split into pieces, it doesn't look like a timeline, looks like a broken mosaic.
I believe we've called this "slit-scan" photography and it's been in use for just about as long as there have been cameras. In fact, this can be seen as an undesired effect called "rolling shutter" in CMOS cameras, just taken to an extreme.
Anyone interested in this topic should really check out the work done by Amnon Owed and Processing (processing.org):
http://amnonp5.wordpress.com/2011/01/16/eternalism-the-art-of-slitscanning/
In other words, he's using a slit camera to make photo finish images (but with the subject something other than finish lines). Technology is being repurposed for a potentially interesting effect, but not technically revolutionary.
When you have nothing left to burn you must set yourself on fire
This technique is commonly used in science, usually referred to as a kinogram where each row of pixels (or each set of rows) is a line-scan taken at successive time-points.
This is what photo finish cameras at horse racetracks have done since the 1930s. It's been used on nearly every race at every racetrack, at least in the US, since (IIRC) the 1950s. It's been used for countless other sporting events.
He could have saved himself a lot of "research" by just buying what he spent so long trying to invent.
http://cs.iupui.edu/~jzheng////RP/index.html
"A route panorama captures and displays miles of scenes along a route optimized to use as little data as possible. It captures scenes with a slit in the frame of a camera moving along a certain route. This presentation details new techniques which do not require image stitching and thus simplifies the input process."
Ancient technique.
I offer up my humble slit scan movie
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrXO-1XEZPY
The only way I can look at these is to think, "what moves is what matters", and "what matters most gets squished". There's some aesthetic amusement when I don't think about it too. The chopped up dancer is... well... interesting. I'm not ready to order framed prints though. It might be interesting to play with the "what matters" and "what matters most gets... " parameters. Oh, and the first one is confusing until you realize it's not a short movie taken at one time. It had to be at least two short movies, because of the way the shadows are.... right?
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
What if you could compress a video clip into a single image? - Animated Gif.
Hell, there's even an app for that on the new iphone. All it takes is a simple video camera and a few lines (not even hundreds) of code (pull the middle five columns out of a video stream and put them next to each other in a bigger image. Rotate the camera at some rate. Or move the object past the camera. Streak cameras move the film to do the same thing with a fixed camera position.)
Marcel Duchamp was exploring this idea one hundred years ago.
http://www.flong.com/texts/lists/slit_scan/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slit-scan_photography
http://seriss.com/people/erco/2001/
Before I clicked, I'd hoped TFA was on a new astronomy technique.
We've got plenty of space-heads here -- how about it? Can you do something like this as another way to process the incredible amount of data you're pulling in?
But has Netcraft confirmed it?
To me, the images seem more like abstract art (which I generally don't connect with) than a revolutionary camera technique.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I don't see why this can't be done by post-processing a video (as long as the camera doesn't move, pan or zoom). It's unique that it can be done with a specialized camera, but I don't think that is necessary.
Better known as 318230.
David Hockney has been making art by slicing together stills to create the impression of a motion event for years. And frankly, his results are a lot more "artistic" that this mechanised and rather dull-lloking technique.
This isn't new. And it's also not as interesting as this.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Why is this article tagged as science? An attempt at shoehorning general relativity is made in the article. Other than that, it is not news worthy under the umbrella of science.
This. I had this down pat with my Kodak Brownie 110 in 1982! Fuck's sake...!
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
A few years back I was in the Sistine chapel (I'm an art-lover: so shoot me). There's some stuff on the wall that tells bible stories in art. Example (I'm making this up, as I can't remember but do remember the technique) Moses on the mountain, getting the commandments from the man upstairs. Moses coming down the mountain, seeing the wild party, Moses smashing the tablets... each vignette has Moses in in at a different time in the story, but in the same painting. He's dressed identically, surrounded by the same people. He might be on the road, top right, then on the same road, middle centre.
So yeah, done before - in the renaissance.
"The greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are right sometimes" - Winston Churchill
Movies were invented to prove horses had all 4 feet off the ground at times when they ran using a series of still cameras. "The Matrix" then used the exact same technique to "invent" it's most notable special effect.
Slit scan photography was developed in the 1930's to determine not only which horse won a race, but how far back in time the other horses were. This guy "invented" the exact same technique.
If you think you've come up with a new technique for imaging a moving object, make sure it hasn't already been invented decades ago to image a horse.
Hey guys, I think this technique may already exist.
I'm just going by the fact that fifteen other people have independently pointed out the same thing.
What a bunch of bullshit. This is quite possibly the stupidest headline derived from a story since Obama claimed the Video was the cause....