In case you never heard of it: The bullet time effect has been around for a while, but became really famous when it was popularized with the movie “The Matrix” from 1999.

While it can easily be recreated in purely rendered form like animated movies or video games, it is still quite involved and costly to achieve with real cameras: You set up an array of photo cameras, trigger them all simultaneously and play back the individual photos as frames of a video. The result is that the scene seems to be frozen in time while the camera moves around freely.

When I said that the bullet time effect is still expensive, I have to admit that it has become much cheaper since 1999. I looked for old used DSLRs. They have large (albeit old) sensors, they support means to remotely trigger the shutter, they have plenty of resolution, their settings can be controlled precisely and nobody except me is interested in them anymore. The trick is that we are using the photo mode of these old DSLRs to create a video, which means that we are comparing old photo specs with modern video specs. So, I looked for the oldest mainstream beginner DSLR that has a decent resolution and picked the Canon EOS 400D from 2006.

See the video below and more here. The code is on GitHub.

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