Sorry for the Facebook video, but it’s an example of what I’m talking about.
I’ve been watching a lot of motorcycle reels on Facebook. The camera catches the motorcycles from the front, as if they’re on a stick, but there’s no stick. The cameras also pan and zoom. All of the videos I’ve seen are wide angle, but not quite fisheye. How do they get these shots?
My husband’s company makes gimbals for vehicle-mounted cameras, and I know that when they film things like bicycle or motocross races, the camera is mounted on a bike or truck riding alongside (or in front) of the racers. This looks a lot like it’s filmed from another bike.
It does, kind of. But the formations in these videos seem to precise for another vehicle, and I’ve seen the same types of shots when a rider is splitting lanes.
It is a camera on a stick.
More precisely, it is a camera on a stick that captures everything around it. This is commonly called a 360° camera, although it should really be called a 720° camera. This is done using more than one lens / sensor. Because the images from these sensors overlap, you can erase the stick from the image.
See here for a product advertisement / explanation: https://youtu.be/dGTEUUPsk74?si=7L29nDRxxpdYHRWW
That’s really amazing!
Thank you, and welcome to SDMB.
Thanks!
This guy shows how it’s done, the stick disappears automatically based on how you position the camera. I guess the motorcycle video must have the stick attached to his bike somewhere, but I’ve seen ice skaters, roller skaters, cyclists, and runners just holding theirs on a selfie stick. If it’s sunny and there’s a wide field of view, you can usually catch a glimpse of the whole thing in the shadows on the ground. Panning and zooming is all done in editing.
I was going to say, if you have enough cameras to digitally reconstruct the scene (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photogrammetry then you can put a virtual camera anywhere you like.
Very cool!
Yes, I see a number of videos from a fellow in Fernie(?) who taught his young children how to ski, and he uses the same thing. There’s a particular selfie stick trick that allows you to automatically edit videos to eliminate the stick from the view. IIRC in his case it was a special camera with the edit facility built in.
The other thing to mention about these 360 cameras is that you can typically compose the shot in the edit - the camera captures (more or less) a spherical video; you can extract a video from that in which a more conventional camera view moves around to capture (actually crop out) an interesting action shot from within that sphere of video.
Alternatively, some platforms permit the whole spherical video to be published, often with the ‘camera angle’ consisting of something more akin to a script of suggestions, and allow the end viewer to either accept the camera angle suggested by the videographer, or choose to look in a different direction.
This is what I was thinking of …
That Mountain Life on Youtube -
If you’ve watched any of our family’s adventures, you’ve probably seen footage captured with our Insta360 camera. This powerful little camera is absolutely amazing, and I almost never leave the house without it. Not only does it have the ability to film in 4k, but it also records 360 degrees.