American Cinematographer - December 2009 - 87

Through testing and discussion, we determined we would need five projectors to create a 300-degree field of view with approximately 10 percent of image overlap between the projectors. These would project an image onto a cylindrical screen that would surround the Humvee on the motion platform and cover 100 percent of the soldiers’ perspective out the windows and in the mirrors. Anywhere they look from the inside of the Humvee, or from the gunner position on top of the vehicle, they’ll see screen with seamless HD projection. We shot the material with a camera rig constructed by Carlos Acosta that held eight Iconix HD-RH1 cameras under 45-degree half-mirrors to generate eight 1920x1080 streams that would be stitched together to form a single 15Kx1080 progressive image. The rig was reminiscent of the old CircleVision camera, with modern tweaks. To accommodate the stitching of the individual image streams into one image, I had to find a camera configuration and lens combination that would give me a slight image overlap of 6-8 percent. Once the streams were stitched together, some sections ended up being 12 minutes long, and at 15Kx1080 30-fps progressive, 12minute parallel-stream files create a data-management nightmare! In the field, the streams from the Iconix cameras were sent to four Codex Digital Portable recorders (two HD streams per recorder) and two HFV HD video recorders. The playback system comprises five 2K Christie projectors mounted on a truss rig over the Humvee and positioned to create one seamless 300-degree image. The 15Kx1080 stream is sliced into five independent 20 Mb/s (server spec, the highest server data rate we could do in our configuration) 30-fps 1920x1080 Mpeg streams that are played out of multiple CoolLux servers. The same servers also host the master controls, the user interface and the 7.1 Surround soundtrack for all the streams, and have to play back all the streams in perfect sync. In the field, the Iconix rig was Left: The crew prepares to shoot on location in the Alabama Hills near Lone Pine, Calif. Below: The camera rig, which comprised eight Iconix HDRH1 cameras, was mounted to a Flight Head III on a Z Crane attached to the top of a Mercedes ML55 SUV. mounted to a Flight Head on a Z Crane attached to the top of a Mercedes ML55 SUV that was driven by Ross Jordan. We had military advisers on the project every step of the way, and we followed very specific military procedures, including the speed the drivers were trained to maintain and how they would execute each maneuver on the road. We shot the sequences in the Alabama Hills near Lone Pine, Calif., which has rough, rocky terrain that is similar to terrain in the Middle East. I knew I needed a gyro head to keep the camera stabilized over the rough terrain; I also knew that would be a problem because of the way movie gyro heads work, but I didn’t have an adequate alternative within our budget and timeline. Movie gyro heads are made to keep their heading no matter what happens to the platform below it. We had the Flight Head out on the arm in front of the camera car, but when the vehicle turned right, the head compensated and panned the camera to maintain the original heading. We wound up having to operate the camera to compensate for every turn and bend in the road, which turned out to be an enormously difficult task, but we got most of the way American Cinematographer 87

American Cinematographer - December 2009

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