Saturday, April 16, 2005

Panoramic Video Field Test

Taking bizzare motion affect (or is it effect?) to the streets, as it were.

11 comments:

Wiley said...

I think that's what it would be like to be psychic.

cemenTIMental said...

That clip's amazing/terrifying!

via that site I found that Flaming Pear have a free photoshop filter called 'ornament' which allows you to generate a similar panarama from a photo of a christmas tree bauble or whatever other mirrored sphere you can find. I imagine a ball bearing would be good for macro panoramas!

download from:
http://www.flamingpear.com/goodies.html

I'll have to see if it'll work on in After Effects... otherwise an image sequence batch converted in Photoshop will do the job I suppose.

Wiley said...

Well the whole deal here isn't necessarily the distortion, but the fact that this was shot with a panoramic lens... it's actually a 360 degree view. Taking a normal shot and then warping it wouldn't be quite as mind bending. This really makes me want to find a panoramic lens and find a way to attatch it to my dv camera.

Rob said...

Well I suppose I could have been more articulate in my post, but Wiley cuts right to the chase - to me this is an amazing example of taking something that typically sucks (spheroid mumbo-jumbo) and kind of reverse engineering it to make it completely chilling and (for my money) oddly visceral.

I keep watching the section where he goes through the door over and over. It's like 'where does the door come from?'.

cemenTIMental said...

>panoramic lens... it's actually a 360 degree view. >Taking a normal shot and then warping it wouldn't

I know... that's what I mean: you could rig up a reflective sphere in front of your lens on a stick, shoot some footage and then use the plugin I mentioned to unwrap it into a panorama very similar to this, only of course using this method it'd include an image of the camera in shot! I think the distance from ball to lens would determine how close to actual 360 you get...

Actually, just looking at this page on how they did it:
http://www.inertia-llc.com/sandbox/360onevr-video/index.html
It seems their device also has the camera in shot... in fact the reflector is attatched by a stick to the center of the lens! So depending on the rig and the method of unwrapping the image you probably could actually get a shot without the camera visible by pointing the camera upwards at the sphere. Their reflector is not spherical, but a sphere should work to some extent I would think. I'll do some experimentation some time...

I bet proper 360 lenses are very expensive... :(

Wiley said...

Do they show how the hell they mounted it to the dv camera?

I want to do this so bad now...

Just another expensive thing to want, along with 3d video lenses.

Wiley said...
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Wiley said...

This brings up something interesting:
This effect would be totally ruined if you showed it in a 4.3 frame and so-so in 16.9...
which brings me to my point- since so much delivery is happening online, why isn't anyone making films or music videos in bizarre aspect ratios? Quicktime can do whatever you tell it to... imagine a short or a video with like a 40.6 aspect ratio... one that actually uses that space in an interesting way. Sure no camera can shoot like that, but you can crop and composit to make something interesting...

Somebody give me some money so I can quit my job and do shit like this.

cemenTIMental said...

Yeah, there's a picture of the thing at http://www.inertia-llc.com/sandbox/360onevr-video/index.html
It's a commercially avaliable 360 lens, but my idea of a DIY version would work in the same way I guess..

I too have thought of making films in strange ratios, definitely something that could be interesting. One idea is widening the gate of Standard-8 film cameras so that you could get an image right to the edge of the film, and crop between the sproket holes to a very wide widescreen!

cemenTIMental said...

or a 1 pixel high adaptation of Flatworld.

McJanus said...

360° video rocks, for sure! I've just got involved into it after years of still panoramic pictures... Now it's time to contribute to evolution of human vision online ;)

By the way, if you wanna look at my very first video 360°, here it is:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0z5tQITRH2g

Meanwhile, best regards to you from Geneva (Switzerland)
Best regards,
JM
Photographer in Geneva