bmaltais's dashboard

I want to start a discussion about an idea I had on how to build nice synth quickly and efficiently by leveraging the sheer power of an HD cam as a super fast continuous picture camera.

The idea is to use a good HD consumer camcorder (like my Canon HV20) to record progressive video of a scene while looking around from multiple location in the space. A good tripod/monopod should be used to get stable video from the scene.

You then import this video from the camera and then export it to a folder as 6 pps (pictures per second... 6 is a nice number because it divide the 24 frames per second of my HD footage quite evenly) jpg (you can do this via Quicktime movie to picture function). Simply navigate the 100s (or 1000s) of individual pictures to select the ones you think would by "synthy" and use that to build a nice synth of a scene. One could go crazy here and actually use the 1000s pictures to make the synth... ouch!

What do you think of that? The best would be if photosynth could accept the raw (or h264 converted) footage and analyse it on it's own to pick the best frames based on acceptable pictures differenciation and then use the pictures of what is relevant from it. This way it would save all the work of exporting and selecting.

Photosynth could even slice the inter picture to picture video in small chunk to show nice transitions from selected pictures to pictures. Essentially creating the illusion of walking in the picture path in 3D.