DIY Super high resolution “Octo-Cam” for capturing the World’s Largest Dodgeball Game

Three years in a row!

In 2010 the University of Alberta set the record for World’s Largest Dodgeball Game and my video got over 775,000 hits.

In 2011 the U of A broke the record again and captured it with a 360-degree video camera that I built.

This year the record would be set again with 5,000 students participating. I figured this was a great opportunity to do a GigaTag where you make a GigaPan image and link it with Facebook so all 5,000 participants can tag themselves and their friends on Facebook.

I’ve shot dozens and dozens of panoramas over the years and one challenge is always movement between frames. I wanted to capture a GigaPan image of the 2012 World Record Dodgeball Game but it would be impossible with one camera shooting multiple images.

The solution?

Here is my crazy “Octo-Cam” made from aluminum and eight Canon Rebel T2i’s with 50mm f1.8 lenses. Each camera shoots 18 megapixels and when I stitched the images together with PTgui I can create a 220MP panorama!

 

 Photo by Fish Griwkowsky.

AMAZING thanks to Don’s Photo for lending me the eight Canon Rebel T2i cameras and Canon 50mm f1.8 lenses.

I went to Metal Supermarkets with my design and they cut all of the 2″ x 4″ aluminum for me in an hour! In total it only cost about $120.

It took about eight hours to drill and assemble the frame and another eight hours to wire everything together. I used a PocketWizard Multi-Max to trigger the cameras.

Eight cameras means eight battery chargers! I was amazed that the batteries were able to last for over 2,700 images. They weren’t even dead!

Stitching test photos with PTgui. The final resolution depends on how much overlap you have between images.

I had PTgui interpolate the image to make it the maximum 25,000 pixels wide that JPEG allows.

 

So what’s the end result?

Check out http://www.edmontonjournal.com/sports/u-of-a-dodgeball/index.html where you can zoom-in and tag yourself on Facebook !

 

What’s next?    The Octo-Cam actually shot one picture every second for the whole game!!!

Soon there will be a video time lapse version of the panorama! Stay tuned!