Create Your Own Bullet Time Camera Rig With Raspberry Pi

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."

Comments

costs less than a professional DSLR camera?

[csumpi]

48 rpis = 48 * $35 = $1680
48 cameras = 48 * $30 = $1440
48 piface = 48 * $34 = $1632
48 2gb sd cards = 48 * $8 = $384
48 5V PSU = $48 * 3 = $144

Up to here, it's $5280. Not including:

about half a kilometre of network cable
2 x 24 port switches
1 wireless router
custom laser cut frame
shipping

So let's say $6k. You can buy a nice professional DSLR for much much cheaper than that.

Re:costs less than a professional DSLR camera?

[blackraven14250]

Canon sells the EOS 60D under their professional section, for $900. The second highest, the EOS 5D Mark III, is $3,400, and the highest, the EOS-1D X, is $6,800. Even moving to their most expensive non-EOS camcorder, the XF305, you're talking $8000.

In sum, if you think professional DSLR's all cost more than this contraption, you haven't gone looking. Most professional photographers don't drop $20k+ on a Hollywood-level camcorder, and a huge number don't go beyond the ballpark of $6,800 for a DSLR.

CHDK=much better quality for same or slightly more

[foobar bazbot]

For each station, we have (priced at Newark):
$40 Raspberry Pi B w/ NOOBS SD card.
$25 Camera module
$34 Piface display/control (seriously? why? aren't they controlled over the network? why aren't they headless? Oh, right: because this whole project is advertisement for Piface, even though their hardware contributes nothing of value to it...)

Making a total of $99 at each station. That's not counting ethernet cable, switches, and for no obvious reason, a separate 5V PSU for each Pi -- I left that out of the per-station cost, because anyone sane would use one power supply for multiple stations.

Now for $99, I can damn sure buy a cheap digital camera for each station, (and an SD card for each of them, if necessary), and have larger sensors, better glass, and crazy features like not being fixed-focus vs. the Raspberry Pi camera module. Sadly, remote shutter is not a common thing on the sort of cheap camera we're looking at, so some hardware hacking (*gasp*) might be required, and many camera models have issues like automatic power off that will make your life miserable -- so for an arbitrary cheap camera, this is better in some ways, worse in others, and not necessarily better on the whole. But with CHDK, we can beat it easily.

It'd be great if we had $120 a station -- for that money, we can easily rock CHDK. $99 is just on the edge, but I think you can find CHDK-compatible Canons for less (e.g. this one; note that other colors are cheaper, but very limited quantity, and without more research, I'm not sure that any of them will actually have firmware revisions supported by CHDK) -- if so, or if we can agree that the combination of better image quality, extra features, and reduced ethernet hardware, is worth a few extra bucks, you should have two options:
1. use USB hubs with CHDK's PTP extensions to control multiple CHDK-loaded cameras from each Raspberry Pi -- this will allow staggering individual cameras for the true bullet-time effect where the viewpoint revolves around a slow-motion (not completely frozen) subject, as well as the all-at-once mode described in TFA, and any combination.
2. forget the Raspberry Pis, and control the cameras using CHDK's USB remote shutter capability -- this is very simple in the all-at-once case, as you can simply wire 48 USB ports to a single 5V PSU, and switch it on and off. The proper effect is a little more complicated, but still no-CPU-required, e.g. use a single debounced pushbutton to generate a pulse, and clock source + a half-dozen 8-bit shift registers to sequence that pulse to all 48 USB cables. Or use a microcontroller with those shift registers to generate the pulse and the clock -- by varying the clock, you speed/slow the ratio of subject motion to viewpoint motion. Or use a microcontroller with enough GPIO to control all the cameras directly.

Need the LHC

[Roger W Moore]

Well for a real frozen time effect you need the LHC - time passes over 14,000 times slower for the protons in it than it does for us. Although it is a little bit less interesting on film given that the protons don;t really do much!

While I agree that the device is really interesting comparing it to the LHC is like comparing a pea shooter to a nuclear missile. Our "cameras" are 14 storeys tall, take 25 million pictures per second, have single cables that are over 500m long and took decades of work by thousands of people to design and build. The feeling you get when something that big finally works and, even better, discovers some new, fundamental physics is a little bit more intense.

Re:Affect/effect

[gl4ss]

..and you wouldn't compare the picture of a p&s with the camera module either.

I don't think the pi camera modules do much processing on chip though? so I guess the thing to compare here would be comparing it to buying 48 eight mobile phones at 70 bucks(j2me or the cheapest possible pos androids you can find) or so and sw.

I'm just irritated by the headline. the headline implies a single raspberry which for controlling all the cameras would be kinda neat BUT if you buy 48 raspberry pi's with cameras then going to the bullet time recording is rather trivial(you would still need some creativity to use it to create something creative of course).

also, better uses for 48 cameras in an installation: 3d scanning.