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Science Technology

Camera Technique Captures New View of Space & Time 75

Posted by samzenpus from the sll-at-one-time dept.
kkleiner writes "What if you could compress a video clip into a single image? That's what Jay Mark Johnson, an artist and visual effects director, has accomplished through the use of a special camera technique. He calls the images 'photographic timelines,' and his collected works offer quite a shift to conventional perception. Slices of photos are strung together in progression to make a single composite image of a sliver of space spread over an extended period of time."
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Camera Technique Captures New View of Space & Time More

Camera Technique Captures New View of Space & Time

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  • GIF (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 29, 2012 @03:57PM (#41810375)

    "What if you could compress a video clip into a single image? "

    you get a GIF.

    • An animated GIF is a single file made up of several images... not a single image

      • It is strange how terminology is formed... now 'image' is synonymous to 'static visual image' in computational contexts. In neurosciences it may refer to other modalities, such as 'sound images', or 'tactile images'.
        But that's the beauty of language, it is alive.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by mcgrew ( 92797 ) *

          But that's the beauty of language, it is alive.

          Aw, man, you missed the opportunity for a joke. Tomorrow's Halloween. It's.... aliiiiIIIIIVE!!!!

    • Why was PNG finally able to replace GIF but MNG failed to replace the animated GIF?

      • because animated .PNG is a thing, and people are to lazy to change the way the do things.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Teancum ( 67324 )

        The early animated GIF images really was the only way to effectively perform any sort of animation when they originally came out, thus they got widespread browser and editor support. The MNG file format instead came much later... after there were other alternatives such as motion JPEG, and especially the ubiquitous Microsoft AVI format not to mention Quicktime, Real Media, and MPEG that were all coming out at about the same time. While MNG wasn't really trying to get into the video format business (IMHO a

  • $85000 camera? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by dalias ( 1978986 ) on Monday October 29, 2012 @03:59PM (#41810395)
    Pretty sad that it took an $85000 camera to do the same thing you could do with any video camera and a few hundred lines of code...

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Looks like the same technique they use to take horse race photo finishes.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tsa ( 15680 )

        Yes, I also don't see what's new here.

      • And photo finishes of a rowing race.

        As far as I know, this type of equipment exists for at least 30 years. It's called a line camera.

    • OK, you first.

    • Pretty sad that it took an $85000 camera to do the same thing you could do with any video camera and a few hundred lines of code...

      Or about 3 lines if you use OpenCV.

      • Yeah? What would those three lines of code be exactly? Time to put your money where your mouth is.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Pedant ( 75947 )

      With a cheap video camera, he could make videos with the space and time axes swapped.

    • There's an app for that. $1.99 at iTunes.

    • Re:$85000 camera? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by grumbel ( 592662 ) <grumbel+slashdot@gmail.com> on Monday October 29, 2012 @05:35PM (#41811505) Homepage

      Hundred? Try two:

      mplayer -vo jpeg -vf "crop=$WIDTH:$HEIGHT:$X:$Y" -ss "$STARTPOS" -endpos "$DURATION" "$VIDEOFILE"
      montage -geometry "${WIDTH}x${HEIGHT}" -tile x1 *.jpg "$OUTFILE"

      Set WIDTH to 1 and HEIGHT to the size of the video file. (Warning: will spam the current directory with a whole bunch of jpegs).

      • Handy!

        I wrote a slightly longer script to do the same (in PHP, stop laughing) to do some large-scale 'scanning' from public transit in Seattle. Firstly, I need a camera with a higher framerate (60fps isn't really enough) and secondly, I need to lock exposure, white balance and so on. But the very first attempt [hylobatidae.org] turned out quite well.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dalias ( 1978986 )
        No need for ImageMagick. MPlayer has its own tile filter.

  • Not New (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 29, 2012 @04:00PM (#41810425)

    They have been doing this for years... Go look at the "photo finish" of any horse race to see the same effect.

    • Even worse, it shows that many people aren't actually exposed to x-t diagrams in high school physics, otherwise they wouldn't be able to come up with the silly idea that they actually invented something new.

      • Totally Agree. Also, my students used to do this as an art project 7 years ago. They did nice slices through a whole football (non-american) game.

    • ...or Google "slit scan camera". There's a smartphone app for this.

  • Slit Scan Photography (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 29, 2012 @04:05PM (#41810477)

    I believe we've called this "slit-scan" photography and it's been in use for just about as long as there have been cameras. In fact, this can be seen as an undesired effect called "rolling shutter" in CMOS cameras, just taken to an extreme.

    Anyone interested in this topic should really check out the work done by Amnon Owed and Processing (processing.org):
    http://amnonp5.wordpress.com/2011/01/16/eternalism-the-art-of-slitscanning/

    • But, the point is, he's an artist and his stuff looks cool... it's not his fault he was raised under a rock and rediscovered the wheel a century after its invention.

  • Photo Finish (Score:5, Informative)

    by Lev13than ( 581686 ) on Monday October 29, 2012 @04:10PM (#41810529) Homepage

    In other words, he's using a slit camera to make photo finish [wikipedia.org] images (but with the subject something other than finish lines). Technology is being repurposed for a potentially interesting effect, but not technically revolutionary.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I've seen this being re-purposed for "art" before too, and even back then the artist/ audience realized it wasn't that great. This guy hasn't done anything innovative since then....other than with digital gear?

      The images are still uninspiring. I wish I could name the artist who did this in the 70s.... maybe he was a photojournalist for the AP.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jovius ( 974690 )

      Yeah, an interesting and unique artistic application of the tech. There's a preset example in Processing (Library/Capture/SlitScan) which one can use to create custom slit scans from live video or movement. It's widely used as the basis for such projects, and there are many examples [youtube.com] on YouTube.

      I've seen one piece where the slit scan was created in sort of 3D and the depth of the image captured the different time frames. The frames could be revealed at any point and sort of dug and sliced into, but that was

  • Old News from 1992 or earlier (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Culture20 ( 968837 ) on Monday October 29, 2012 @04:13PM (#41810541)
    http://cs.iupui.edu/~jzheng////RP/index.html [iupui.edu]
    "A route panorama captures and displays miles of scenes along a route optimized to use as little data as possible. It captures scenes with a slit in the frame of a camera moving along a certain route. This presentation details new techniques which do not require image stitching and thus simplifies the input process."

  • The only way I can look at these is to think, "what moves is what matters", and "what matters most gets squished". There's some aesthetic amusement when I don't think about it too. The chopped up dancer is... well... interesting. I'm not ready to order framed prints though. It might be interesting to play with the "what matters" and "what matters most gets... " parameters. Oh, and the first one is confusing until you realize it's not a short movie taken at one time. It had to be at least two short mov

  • What if you could compress a video clip into a single image? - Animated Gif.
  • It's called a streak camera and it has been done for decades. It's used not only for photo finishes of almost every race that has a photo-finish capability, but it was done decades ago in atomic spectroscopy as a detector for spark and arc spectrometers. And it's done on a daily basis for many other sciences, like studying waves running up the beach. (I'd give a link but I don't want to /. the site.)

    Hell, there's even an app for that on the new iphone. All it takes is a simple video camera and a few lines

  • http://www.flong.com/texts/lists/slit_scan/
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slit-scan_photography
    http://seriss.com/people/erco/2001/

  • To me, the images seem more like abstract art (which I generally don't connect with) than a revolutionary camera technique.

  • does anyone else think... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by roc97007 ( 608802 ) on Monday October 29, 2012 @05:02PM (#41811117) Journal

    ...that some of the images look like an updated game of Frogger?

  • I don't see why this can't be done by post-processing a video (as long as the camera doesn't move, pan or zoom). It's unique that it can be done with a specialized camera, but I don't think that is necessary.

  • David Hockney has been making art by slicing together stills to create the impression of a motion event for years. And frankly, his results are a lot more "artistic" that this mechanised and rather dull-lloking technique.

  • Not new at all (Score:3)

    by wonkey_monkey ( 2592601 ) on Monday October 29, 2012 @05:48PM (#41811603) Homepage
    This isn't new. And it's also not as interesting as this [youtube.com].
  • Why is this article tagged as science? An attempt at shoehorning general relativity is made in the article. Other than that, it is not news worthy under the umbrella of science.

  • This. I had this down pat with my Kodak Brownie 110 in 1982! Fuck's sake...!

  • A few years back I was in the Sistine chapel (I'm an art-lover: so shoot me). There's some stuff on the wall that tells bible stories in art. Example (I'm making this up, as I can't remember but do remember the technique) Moses on the mountain, getting the commandments from the man upstairs. Moses coming down the mountain, seeing the wild party, Moses smashing the tablets... each vignette has Moses in in at a different time in the story, but in the same painting. He's dressed identically, surrounded by

  • This might not be new! (Score:3)

    by dohzer ( 867770 ) on Monday October 29, 2012 @09:05PM (#41813273)

    Hey guys, I think this technique may already exist.
    I'm just going by the fact that fifteen other people have independently pointed out the same thing.

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