NEWS
Camera array
Again this is not strictly motion control, I was contacted by a producer who knew that I had worked with Tim Macmillian in the 90's, who asked me to build an array of 50 cameras for a P+O cruises commercial.
The issue with timeslice is not getting hold of the cameras, it's getting hold of enough glass lenses with manual focus and manual aperture, Over 15 years I collected 60 identical 28mm glass lenses.
I used Canon RP (full frame) cameras (Fantasically supplied by Graham Dimmock at LCE in Bath) combined with Takumar 28mm lenses that I had collected over the last 15 years
First I built a syncroniser that would check the response of the camera and then fire all 50 at once, ensuring that the cameras were at least 1ms accurate. Here are the initial sync tests without any post production.
A grip setup of 450mm perforated extrusion which would hold the cameras and would be posable so it could make a radius, each piece is so short that the rig can be transported in a number of 1550 peli cases.
The idea was that a single operator could take this to various remote locations and that everything could be transported as hold baggage. Although it's quite a few cases it will go on a regular passenger airliner as excess baggage.
Camera triggering for animation
This is not strictly motion control, but for this job I built a system to syncronise a digital stills camera and a moving car.
NISSAN - Design in Motion from Carl Burke on Vimeo.
Nissan 'Design in motion' behind the scenes from James Medcraft DP on Vimeo.
SFX Triggering with motion control
In this commercial the table flipping was triggered at exactly the same time from timecode coming from and audio track that also triggered the playback and motion control.
Stella Artois I It's time to dine again from unit+sofa on Vimeo.
Speed ramping with Motion Control
Speed ramps for motion control were simple enough with film cameras, but have been a bit tough for digital cameras. I was asked to do a speed ramp for a commercial last August. This was an idea I had been thinking about for a long time, I built some hardware to process the sync pulses from a set 25fps source (in theory the camera) and a “Fake” camera that I had built that pretended to be a film camera. A Raspberry Pi then created a text file with the number of the frame we needed to extract. The rushes were then turned into DPX files and the relevant files extracted by a script.
We made a system to extract low resolution files to make a “Video Assist” to deliver the ramped image in a shorter time.
© Justin Pentecost, 2024.