MF On-ride photo
Actually, as you come out of one of the tunnels is an obvious spot, because then the inside of the tunnel becomes the background for the photo. That way, there is no risk of a midway patron, or a vehicle on the perimeter road, or anything else getting into the photo that shouldn't be there.
--Dave Althoff, Jr.
Hopefully it won't suffer the same synchronation problems as Magnum's camera at the end of the season.
I don't understand how it can be working and then not be functioning. Does it get reset?
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Tyler Adams
Cedar Point Web
http://www.zoomnet.net/~bmgain *** This post was edited by Tyler on 1/3/00. ***
I don't understand how it can be working and then not be functioning. Does it get reset?
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Tyler Adams
Cedar Point Web
http://www.zoomnet.net/~bmgain *** This post was edited by Tyler on 1/3/00. ***
I never looked at Magnum hard enough to see what triggers the camera, but it was a full seat behind by the end of the season.
Let me clarify... the cameras themselves can freeze motion, even at that speed. The electronic shutter can take care of that. The trick, and I doubt this is difficult these days, is buffering the images quickly.
PKI's Face/Off shoots the images at the bottom of the second incline, where the train is seriously trucking. Because the seats face each other, a huge bank of cameras catch half the seats coming out of the loop, the others down the incline. Since there appears to be one camera per row of seats, I'm assuming that there is a separate frame buffer for each one.
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Jeff
Webmaster/Guide to The Point
Let me clarify... the cameras themselves can freeze motion, even at that speed. The electronic shutter can take care of that. The trick, and I doubt this is difficult these days, is buffering the images quickly.
PKI's Face/Off shoots the images at the bottom of the second incline, where the train is seriously trucking. Because the seats face each other, a huge bank of cameras catch half the seats coming out of the loop, the others down the incline. Since there appears to be one camera per row of seats, I'm assuming that there is a separate frame buffer for each one.
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Jeff
Webmaster/Guide to The Point
There is a prox switch on the track, and when the train hits that the timers start clicking off frames into the capture buffers. I think there is only one trigger for all eighteen shots on Magnum...if the train is overshooting the mark, it generally means either a delay is misset, a prox switch moved, or the train is moving faster or slower than it was the last time the system was calibrated. There are many ways to trigger a camera...on Serial Thriller at Geauga Lake, for instance, there is a retroreflective disc on one side of each car. That disc provides a bounce surface for an optical pair mounted at the camera position to trigger the frame-grabber. Oh, I am guessing that for these things the preference is to pick a spot where there is more than 1/30 of a second between shots; that way a standard CCD video camera with a high-speed shutter can be used to take the pictures. If we figure that the seats are about 6' apart, that would be 180 feet per second, which would be about 122 mph to cover the
action with one camera. Of course, if it is moving faster than that, additional cameras can be used. Also, realistically it is desirable to have more than one frame of delay between shots...cutting the delay to two frames reduces the maximum speed to 61 mph, which may explain why Face/Off uses so many cameras.
--Dave Althoff, Jr.
(also a video guy)
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