The ramped trigger changes the speed of time as the shot travels around the array. Think of a slow motion camera on a dolly: it keeps moving at the same speed, while the action it films speeds up or slows down under it.
Plotting Time on a Timeline
We plot the exact moment every camera fires. A typical ramp starts at 30fps so the shot matches the lead in footage, slows into extreme slow motion halfway around the array, then ramps back up to real time to hand over to the lead out. Every value on that curve can be set to whatever the edit needs, in one millisecond steps.
Timing accuracy is what makes a ramp read smoothly; a few milliseconds of error shows as a jump in the footage. The trigger is hand built around a microprocessor control unit driving trigger boxes of six cameras each, running standalone or linked to our bullet time software, which adds a full visual interface for the firing pattern.
The Other Patterns
The same hardware fires static frozen and sequential patterns, plus custom patterns built per shot, and switches between them in seconds. The trigger overview page covers the whole system.
Contact us to talk through a ramped shot.