A Bullet Time Video Booth You Can Build

A Bullet Time Video Booth You Can Build

[Sebastian Staacks] built a video booth for his wedding, and the setup was so popular with family, that it was only fitting to do one better and make some improvements to the setup, Matrix-style. The “bullet time” video effect was introduced by the classic movie franchise and makes for a splendid video transition effect for video montages.


Hardware-wise, the effect is pretty expensive, requiring many cameras at various angles to be simultaneously triggered, in order to capture the subject in a fixed pose with a rotating camera. Essentially you need as many cameras as frames in the sequence, so even at 24 frames per second (FPS), that’s a lot of hardware. [Sebastian] cheated a bit, and used a single front-facing camera for the bulk of the video recording, and twelve individual DSLRs covering approximately 90 degrees of rotation for the transition. More than that is likely impractical (not to mention rather expensive) for an automated setup used in as chaotic an environment as a wedding reception! So, the video effect is quite the same as in the movies, as this is a fixed pose, but it still looks pretty good.


A Pico-W hidden in there providing a BT connected interface button

[Sebastian] did consider going down the Raspberry Pi plus Pi-cam route, but once you add in a lens and the hassle of the casing and mounting hardware, not to mention availability and cost, snagging a pile of old DLSRs looks quite attractive. Connectivity to the camera is a simple 3.5 mm jack for the focus and trigger inputs, with frames read out via a USB connection.


For practical deployment, the camera batteries were replaced with battery eliminator adapters which step-up the 5 V from the US ..

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