Canon has linked together 50 digital cameras in a world first to ‘freeze’ time during a cinema-photographic action sequence. Fifty EOS 300D digital SLR cameras were used in a technique known as ‘Time Slicing’ or ‘Bullet Time’, a practice which shot to prominence when used to shoot the fight sequences for the film ‘The Matrix’. The results of Time Slicing mean film and television audiences are given the impression of moving around an action sequence which is frozen in time. Until now this technique has relied on the use of analogue film cameras.

Time Slicing with the EOS 300D was first shown to the public at Canon’s European launch of the EOS 300D, held at London’s exclusive venue, Sketch. Within moments of being photographed inside the rig, celebrities and guests were able to view footage of themselves broadcast onto giant plasma screens around the venue.

“Time Slicing had never before been done with digital cameras, and it had never been done outside a studio environment,” said Hiroshi Komatsuzaki, Head of Canon Consumer Imaging Europe. “We really wanted to prove just how far the latest digital SLR technology could go.”

“Using film means that between shooting and checking results, we lose at least one day to developing, printing, film collation and digitisation,” explained Hector MacLeod, Managing Director of Glassworks, the post production company that worked with Canon on the project. “This is frustrating and incredibly costly if we need to recall everyone to re-shoot. Now with Canon we are getting results up instantly. I can’t begin to tell you what a difference that makes.”

How it works
Fixed in place, the EOS 300D cameras are aligned and spaced evenly along a circular rig. Each camera is pointed at a subject standing in the centre of the rig, and a triggering system linked to each of the cameras sets them off, either sequentially or instantaneously. The resulting digital images from the cameras are then automatically downloaded to a central computer, which collates them into ‘flip books’. When viewed in the right order at variable frames per second, the impression is given of having had the subject filmed by a cinema-photographic camera that has spun around the subject at high speed while filming.

“Using Time Slice, there is no theoretical limit to the extent to which motion can be slowed down,” says MacLeod. “For example, we could mount a series of cameras along and around the trajectory of a bullet and provided we could find a way to trigger the cameras and flashes quickly enough, we could show footage of the bullet leaving the barrel of a gun while the
audience moves around it.”

Ian Burley, editor of Digital Photography Now, was at the Canon launch event and has published a light-hearted look at Canon’s digital time slice rig.

“A few journos, who had clearly consumed more than adequate quantities of champagne from rather interesting electrically illuminated plastic champagne flutes (that’s another story ?Ed), were given the opportunity to clamber inside the impressive circular rig of fifty 300D cameras and show off, but we won’t mention any names!”

Website: DP-Now: “Canon EOS-300Ds usher in the era of digital time slicing”