Surf wear maker Rip Curl recently teamed up with Timeslice Films for an ambitious project of shooting surfers in “bullet-time“, the effect that many people first saw in The Matrix. They used a crazy camera array of 52 Canon 5D Mark II Rebel DSLRs in order to capture the same shot from 52 different angles, stringing them together for the final footage.

Here’s the finished video:

To see what they did, check out this awesome behind-the-scenes video they created:

Final Cut Pro – Working with long image sequences

Image Sequence

An image sequence is a number, generally a very large number, of still images that you want to build into a movie. They’re most often created in stop-motion animation, or exported from 3D packages during rendering.

It’s a bad idea to load very large numbers of individual images into FCP. The frames get loaded into RAM which fills up quickly. Even if you adjust the Still Image Cache, if you are using thousands of images, it is very easy to bring your system to its knees.

Instead, open a long image sequence in QuickTime Pro using File > Open Image Sequence, and point it to the folder containing your images to open them as a single file.

Then select File > Export to export this sequence as a QuickTime movie. For highest quality, set the codec to either QuickTime Animation, ProRes 4444, or match the codec you plan to use for your Final Cut Pro sequence.