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Comment by madiator | Hacker News Reader

Very impressive, but why did they need the cameras? All they needed were external flash units and they could still have been triggered without attaching to the cameras. But the cameras add to the impressiveness..

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Yeah, I thought there was going to be some crazy Matrix-style 360 degree spins, or something.

There were several of them in the video. They were rather short sequences, but they looked like they were captured by the cameras.

Thought wrong you did not.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYgw7XRf5nc#t=2m55s

Ah, I take it back. I just saw the long rows of cameras and figured it wasn't possible. I couldn't quite last the whole video...

This is art, not engineering. They used cameras because they wanted cameras.

Inspired by the song's lyrics, "not to make it a memory," Party created the video using 250 Canon still cameras

Memory, e.g. photograph. A bunch of flashes with no cameras is not going to make the metaphor.

my thoughts as well. i'm surprised they didn't try to actually shoot with the cameras and use the resulting photos..?

you mean use the photos to make the video? According to the fastcompany page you can view some photos taken from the cameras on the Brightsiren web page, but I couldn't find them.

There might be interesting potential for making a stop-motion video at the same time, but I bet that's offset by the number of photos where the exposure was waaay too off.

They did. Those frozen wrap around Matrix style shots are from the wall of cameras. They don't use those shots until the latter half of the video. Also, those particular shots don't really look that great, there wasn't enough overlap on the cameras so the motion is kind of choppy.

I think that the choppiness has more to do with the fact that they aren't using any CGI. Some sort of image based rendering (morph effect) to fill in intermediate frames would smooth out the pans significantly, and give it more of a matrix like look.

I'm surprised they didn't do any vertical pans. Perhaps they didn't have enough cameras stacked vertically to give a good effect.

Or it could be because of frame rate of those pans. Increase frame rate and the motion will appear fluid. But it will also be shorter. 250 cameras sounds like a lot but there were maybe just 25 horizontally, so that's 1 second of fluid animation, or 2 seconds of choppy animation. To get a better Matrix-like effect, they would rearrange them so all 250 are used.

Increasing the framerate alone won't get you all the way there, to give the effect the camera is panning around I imagine it will look much better with some motion blur.

"They don't use those shots until the latter half of the video"

ah... caught me red handed. :)

I think it wasn't used - the wraparound shots appear to be from cameras arranged in a circle, but the wall is linear.

Such a disappointment. I would kill to have a camera wall like that.

I think that just might be the effect of wide angle lenses and maybe cropping. Also, pointing all the cameras towards the center of the band.

If you view the music video on their website, they appear to incorporate the some of the photos taken alongside the video.

http://www.androp.jp/brightsiren/

The YouTube video seems to be just the music video but the entire presentation includes the photos.

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