Bullet Time Video Booth



When my cousin asked me to build a video booth for his wedding reception I might have gone a step too far…

More details about the project: https://there.oughta.be/a/bullet-time-video-booth
Buy me a coffee: https://www.buymeacoffee.com/there.oughta.be

00:00 Intro
00:20 What is a bullet time video booth?
02:01 The cameras
03:01 Camera arrangement and processing
04:30 The components
05:00 The quarter circle stand
05:25 Mounts
05:54 Power supplies
06:44 USB hubs
07:58 Camera trigger
09:04 Sony a5000 and HDMI grabber
09:24 Big push buttons
10:00 Lights
10:43 Conclusion
11:46 Outro and examples

source

31 thoughts on “Bullet Time Video Booth”

  1. Amazing. I saw recently someone doing "bullet time" by swinging an insta 360 around their head. Not sure if would work so well at a wedding but might be another option.

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  2. Excellent work! What a thoughtful and meaningful gift for your cousin, and a great project. 🙂

    I resonate with your concerns on USB, and potentially switching to SBCs with ethernet connections instead. I'm planning for a similar transition with one of my own projects, but that comes with it's own challenges huh! Keep up the great work!

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  3. I bet when your cousin asked for a photo both for his wedding, he was not quite expecting this! What an absolutely amazing project with so many smart hidden solutions!

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  4. This is executed extremely well—what an amazing video, thank you so much for sharing, and I'm glad you were able to relay the pitfalls and learnings so clearly (like upgrading from a Pi 3 to an older Dell laptop so guests didn't have to wait so long). I could see a company building out a more reliable version of this and renting it out for events, it looks great!

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  5. Wow, this is such a fantastic project. I love hearing about all the long-tail problems these engineering projects run into. What a final result, though!

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  6. Googles NeRF Neural Radiance Fields method should dramatically reduce the number of cameras needed to do this effect.

    You can probably get away with 4-5 cameras and still get a smooth artifact free bullet-time effect. And the exact alignment/exposure/whitebalance of cameras doesn't matter either, as long as they all capture approximately the right thing.

    Processing is very slow, so you'd still need something else for the preview. Perhaps the "Direct Voxel Grid Optimization: Super-fast Convergence for Radiance Fields Reconstruction" paper, which has published code, and can do a NeRF-like reconstruction in 8 seconds to reasonable fidelity?

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  7. For Dev engineers that want to push this project even further: look at the paper 'Real-Time Depth Video-Based Rendering for 6-DoF HMD Navigation and Light Field Displays' (Bonatto 2021), the supplementary material contains the video view synthesis and some results can be found on YouTube and finally.. The free software for view synthesis 😉 RVS (reference view synthesizer) which allow you to recreate any viewpoint out/in-between the cameras for step in and step out motion. you only need to build the cameras setup, but best part.. You need way less cameras for such quality! 4 maybe 🙂

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  8. The Matrix didn't invent the technique, it just made it famous. The Rolling Stones did it in their music video for "Like a Rolling Stone" a few years before Matrix came out.

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