Setup for Slow motion booth (Editing + Sharing to Social Media)?

[TurboRat]

 

Thinking about setting up a slow motion booth (like the video above) for my sister's wedding. Aside from the camera, I know I'm gonna need a lot of lights. But the tricky part is how can I immediately share the video to other guests? Like something they can immediately upload to their instagram account. So I think the workflow will be something like:

1) Assistant directs the guests

2) Camera guy takes the video

3) ??? - how does it immediately get to the editor?

4) ??? - how does it get uploaded to a server / cloud storage. I assume the editor does this.

5) ??? - how does it get shared to the guests' social media account

I have seen this: https://www.rangefinderonline.com/news-features/tips-techniques/how-to-create-a-slow-motion-photo-booth-and-what-it-can-add-to-your-business/

But there's nothing about editing or uploading on the spot. You guys have some tips? Thanks!

 

 

[BTM_Pix]

5 hours ago, TurboRat said:

But there's nothing about editing or uploading on the spot. You guys have some tips? Thanks!

Funnily enough, we had a long discussion about making a slow motion booth on here a few months ago. 

Its buried inside the GX85 cinelike D hack thread but this links to the start of the conversation.

A lot of it may not be relevant as it was related to creating an unattended booth so it will be much simpler with operators involved.

What camera are you intending to use as I think there is a relatively simple solution in this case.

[Trek of Joy]

The video from Matthew Staffords wedding looks like it was shot on a Red.

I was at an event where they did this with an iPhone taking with a simple setup of a small fluorescent key/fill/hair light. They shot stills, boomerangs and recorded goofy slow mo stuff, sending it to an iPad through an app (don't know what the app was called, but guests were able to email the video to themselves), and broadcast with an Apple tv mirroring the iPad. In good light the iPhone 120fps looks good, and its fine for social. If you didn't have the app, someone could just shoot the video on a phone and airdrop it to an iPad or MacBook for a quick edit, and then it can be emailed or airdropped to other iPhones.

I've attached a shot of the iPad that was used for review and emailing images/videos. Wish I could help with specifics, but a combo of iphone/ipad would be my solution. A ILC presents a lot of headaches in terms of file transfer, file size, edit/render speed and so on. I have the iPhone XS and XS Max (one is supplied by a company I work for, I'm not a two phone dink by choice) and the iPad Pro. I think it would be easy to pull off what you're looking for with my little setup with two people - a shooter and a editor to make quick clips and send them to guests. Five seconds of slow-mo video of someone dancing or throwing crap in the air could easily be edited in iMovie and emailed in less than a minute.

Everything you need including lights and stands can probably be carried in one large bag/case. The days of the DSLR based photo booth are numbered, there's no reason to lug all that around for small instant prints or social when phones and a few lights will get you virtually identical quality. And you can probably charge a lot for the service. Hmmmm...

Chris

[kye]

The weak link definitely seems to be how to get things from the camera to the internet.

It's stunning that camera makers haven't made any real attempts to fix this issue, especially considering that the fixed-slow-prime/awful-low-light/low-DR/low-MP camera on the iPhone has become the most popular camera on the planet because of convenience and constant connection to the internet, and that it overtook the DSLR despite Apple starting off as a dinky computer company at the time that the big photography companies were already ruling the world in photography.

[BTM_Pix]

At the risk of sounding like a shill for Toshiba again, the simple solution for this (and many other things!) is to use one of their FlashAir SD cards in the camera.

Their app then runs on an internet connected smart phone or tablet and allows you to browse and copy the images/video off the card and share them straight onto your social media accounts.

Crucially, as it operates independently of the camera, this can be done in the background without effecting the operation of it. So you can carry on shooting whilst someone else is operating the app to view, select and copy from the SD card.

With the files then on the smartphone/tablet they can of course then be edited if required before transmission to social media.

If you setup a public social media account(s) for the event then guests can simply link or copy the posts to their own account.

Alternatively, the card can also be setup to ftp directly to a cloud account where guests can access the videos or locally to a wirelessly accessible hard drive.

[TurboRat]

16 hours ago, BTM_Pix said:

 

What camera are you intending to use as I think there is a relatively simple solution in this case.

I'm intending to use a GH5s. With a GH5 and A6500 as backup / cameras for candid shots.

 

I'll check the thread that you linked. Thanks!

9 hours ago, Trek of Joy said:

The video from Matthew Staffords wedding looks like it was shot on a Red.

I was at an event where they did this with an iPhone taking with a simple setup of a small fluorescent key/fill/hair light. They shot stills, boomerangs and recorded goofy slow mo stuff, sending it to an iPad through an app (don't know what the app was called, but guests were able to email the video to themselves), and broadcast with an Apple tv mirroring the iPad. In good light the iPhone 120fps looks good, and its fine for social. If you didn't have the app, someone could just shoot the video on a phone and airdrop it to an iPad or MacBook for a quick edit, and then it can be emailed or airdropped to other iPhones.

I've attached a shot of the iPad that was used for review and emailing images/videos. Wish I could help with specifics, but a combo of iphone/ipad would be my solution. A ILC presents a lot of headaches in terms of file transfer, file size, edit/render speed and so on. I have the iPhone XS and XS Max (one is supplied by a company I work for, I'm not a two phone dink by choice) and the iPad Pro. I think it would be easy to pull off what you're looking for with my little setup with two people - a shooter and a editor to make quick clips and send them to guests. Five seconds of slow-mo video of someone dancing or throwing crap in the air could easily be edited in iMovie and emailed in less than a minute.

Everything you need including lights and stands can probably be carried in one large bag/case. The days of the DSLR based photo booth are numbered, there's no reason to lug all that around for small instant prints or social when phones and a few lights will get you virtually identical quality. And you can probably charge a lot for the service. Hmmmm...

Chris

Yeah I was thinking about an Iphone and even and Android setup. Thank you for telling me about this but it looks like it's a customizable app. It's impressive how software can bridge the gap between a smartphone and a full fledged camera

8 hours ago, kye said:

The weak link definitely seems to be how to get things from the camera to the internet.

It's stunning that camera makers haven't made any real attempts to fix this issue, especially considering that the fixed-slow-prime/awful-low-light/low-DR/low-MP camera on the iPhone has become the most popular camera on the planet because of convenience and constant connection to the internet, and that it overtook the DSLR despite Apple starting off as a dinky computer company at the time that the big photography companies were already ruling the world in photography.

Yes precisely I was thinking about this. That cameras are lacking the software to immediately put the shots anywhere. Panasonic has an app where you can immediately get the pictures but compressing and sending the videos are lacking.

2 hours ago, BTM_Pix said:

At the risk of sounding like a shill for Toshiba again, the simple solution for this (and many other things!) is to use one of their FlashAir SD cards in the camera.

Thanks! I'll take a look at the FlashAir SD card. Can it get the footage from a GH5s while shooting and transfer it to the Iphone app? Then edit it on another Iphone app? Is that the correct workflow?

 

After further research, I saw that it is also possible to use a capture card using an Elgato to capture the shots to a laptop. I'm also thinking about going to that route but the elgato will only record up to 60fps. Was kinda wishing to go up to 90fps at the minimum. But it's if the best solution, i'll either go FlashAir SD card or Elgato to After Effects with Twixtor

[BTM_Pix]

2 hours ago, TurboRat said:

Thanks! I'll take a look at the FlashAir SD card. Can it get the footage from a GH5s while shooting and transfer it to the Iphone app? Then edit it on another Iphone app? Is that the correct workflow?

Yes, it is its own little wireless drive so you can be reading from it while the camera writes to it.

When you use the app, it copies the files to the iphone/ipad so you should only need one device as you will be likely editing one file as the next one comes in. If you use LumaFusiom to edit with on the iphone it should also be able to take care of directly transferring the files to cut out a step of using the Toshiba app.

[TurboRat]

1 hour ago, BTM_Pix said:

Yes, it is its own little wireless drive so you can be reading from it while the camera writes to it.

When you use the app, it copies the files to the iphone/ipad so you should only need one device as you will be likely editing one file as the next one comes in. If you use LumaFusiom to edit with on the iphone it should also be able to take care of directly transferring the files to cut out a step of using the Toshiba app.

Yes that's exactly what I'm thinking of doing. Got a bit confused about transferring to another

So one of my options in the workflow is:

1) Camera + FlashAir SD Card

2) Ipad + Toshiba app to download videos

3) Within that Ipad App, Edit with Luma Fusion

4) Upload to Social Media or Dropbox

5) Apple TV to Airplay videos (optional)

#5 is kinda tricky since the ipad can't dual display with Luma Fusion. Trek of Joy's suggestion is good but passing from Ipad to Ipad seems clunky. So I think I'm just going to dual display a laptop to a monitor and play the videos there from the uploads. Would be great to have software to tie these all together (Iphone + apps is a good suggestion) but I just like the professional feel of having a camera there taking the vids.

[TurboRat]

So it looks like FlashAIr W-03 has capabilities where a computer can connect to it via wifi and get the files from the card via browser. Just gonna need some modifying the config file. I'm gonna explore this. Thanks @BTM_Pix and @Trek of Joy for your inputs

[BTM_Pix]

 

2 minutes ago, TurboRat said:

So it looks like FlashAIr W-03 has capabilities where a computer can connect to it via wifi and get the files from the card via browser. Just gonna need some modifying the config file. I'm gonna explore this. 

Yes.

There are a raft of things that you can do with it to create your own workflows if you don't mind getting your hands dirty.

The developer page has tutorials to create scripts to create bespoke configurations. In this case, you might want to think about getting something like a WD Wireless Cloud device as you could then have the files automatically FTPing to it and use that as a central hub so from there you have options to pull them in to edit them or stream them through Apple TV.

https://www.flashair-developers.com/en/documents/tutorials/lua/

 

[Trek of Joy]

7 hours ago, BTM_Pix said:

Yes, it is its own little wireless drive so you can be reading from it while the camera writes to it.

When you use the app, it copies the files to the iphone/ipad so you should only need one device as you will be likely editing one file as the next one comes in. If you use LumaFusiom to edit with on the iphone it should also be able to take care of directly transferring the files to cut out a step of using the Toshiba app.

How reliable is the cards’ connection? Have you ever transferred video with it? I had one of these a few years back and it was not very fast or reliable. Reviews are all over the place with the 4th gen and I’m not a software tinkerer. 

Cheers

chris

[BTM_Pix]

12 minutes ago, Trek of Joy said:

How reliable is the cards’ connection? Have you ever transferred video with it? I had one of these a few years back and it was not very fast or reliable. Reviews are all over the place with the 4th gen and I’m not a software tinkerer. 

Cheers

chris

I have the W-04 and I've found it to be very reliable.

I have used it for video a lot less so than stills but when I was testing it the transfer speed has pretty much been as described by Toshiba so a 100mb file would be about 30-45 seconds.

I can't really comment on other people's experience as there are obviously quite a few variables involved with people's setups but if I take what people said about the eye-fi cards and extrapolate that (i.e. lots of people just couldn't get it to work at all but I found it generally OK within reason) then it doesn't surprise me necessarily that there would be issues reported but I would venture they are as likely to be infrastructure related rather than the card itself.

One factor that can also interfere of course is over conservative power saving settings on the camera putting it to sleep during long transfers.

What I can say though with certainty is that the FlashAir is leaps ahead of the EyeFi cards on every level.

The tinkering aspect is a godsend for specific customisations (or custom applications in my case) but is absolutely optional and the system works fine as is with the native app.

 

[lissa]

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