Cameras pointing everywhere!

[3D diver]

Here's a rig I made with 5 Looxcie HD cameras---3 pointing forward, 2 pointing back---and a pair of DRIS Impact shorty video lights:







I took it diving last Sunday and, after about 14 hours of editing, here's what I ended up with:

 

[soccerrefjason]

Quite interesting. Seems like the rear facing cameras provided very little entertainment, nor did they seem to add anything to the video. Perhaps I'm missing something though. It's easy to tell you have a lot of passion for what you do by the amount of work you put into this.

 

[3D diver]

Hoping to catch something more interesting than my buddy sneaking up on me.

 

[EL Pistoffo]

Talk about wide angle. Very cool idea. If you could get the 3 front cameras to line up perfectly or close to it, and the image colors and exposures to match, the view would be seamless. As soccerrefjason mentioned the rear view cameras don't add much viewing value. They would be better served at the front, both angled down maybe. That is definitely a lot of editing work. Good job. Maybe Google could use you for UW "street" views.

 

[kelemvor]

I bet you could stitch those top three into a superwide 16:3. OTOH, the three streams would look awesome on my 3 monitor PC.

after about 14 hours of editing

Yikes. Therein lies the problem with creating good video.

 

[3D diver]

Stitching software would be nice. This attempt is, conceptually, kind of a cross between some stitched 360 degree view work being done and the ATC Chameleon camera I was tinkering with last year:



I've got the cameras & am just experimenting with ways to use them. (And learning a lot about Sony Vegas in the process.)

---------- Post added June 29th, 2014 at 09:01 PM ----------

Yikes. Therein lies the problem with creating good video.

With this many cameras it's impractical to use the shutter button to turn them on and off so I just let them run. As a result I started with about 2 hours of clips per camera, all with different start and stop times. It took me 2 hours to get them transferred into my computer and 3 hours to get them into the editor, figure out how to get them sized and aligned into the 5 windows, and more, or less, synchronized. My next session I hacked the clips down to 35 minutes of video. My final two 3 hour sessions I mercilessly hacked the clips down to between 4 and 10 seconds, added transitions, recorded a couple of fiddle tunes & added titles.

During the last session I created two intermediate renders to see how things looked---Vegas has playback issues sometimes with fades/transitions.

My son is studying video/animation in college and fed me a couple of helpful editing tips along the way.

 

[EL Pistoffo]

Vegas can be touchy during playback. When It gets finicky, restarting it may help. Make sure to save your work periodically along the way, it's crashed on me on occasions.
It sounds like you might need a beefier PC. A lot of RAM would help with load times in the editor. I have 16GB of RAM and I don't have any load issues but then again I haven't tried loading up five 2hr clips either.
Your idea of cutting down the clips is a good one. You only want to work with the interesting stuff anyways.

 

[avigulf]

Cool project, like a moving seafloor surveilance rig. In stead of 2 cams pointing back maybe one down and one up instead.

sent from mobile unit

 

[diver 85]

Hoping to catch something more interesting than my buddy sneaking up on me.

Like a beautiful mermaid???.........Some say they are VERY stealthy....

 

[3D diver]

Lonely widower...a mermaid would be nice.

Here's what I wish I had:

360Heros | All Around You | 360 Video | Spherical Video

or

CENTR Cam Is A GoPro Competitor That Captures Everything Around You | TechCrunch

The Looxcie HD's don't have a wide enough field of view for the 360 degree idea.

I have 32GB of ram...btw...the long load times were getting the files from the memory card to hard disk.