district7.com - A recent journey to China yielded fantastic imagery that was yearning to be used. We decided that we would take the highly popular Prisma App to the next level and re-shoot an entire timelapse video using the app itself. After more than 80 hours of post production and 2500 individual frames we were able to complete this tedious project and hand stitch it all together. The result is an immersive experience that paints a completely different picture from reality.
Each frame of the 1 minute and 20 second video had to be processed via the Prisma App which took almost 80 hours to complete. The processing/rendering was at the mercy of the servers. Most of the project had to be completed between 11pm and 4am EST because the app would freeze or shutdown due to overloaded serves or too many users on at the same time.
Thankfully the algorithm used to create the painting-like scene(s) was very consistent when it came to processing the images. The total video was approximately 2500 frames and took a bit of ingenuity to stitch together.
By the end of the project (which took around 5 days to produce) my fingers were numb and eyes bloodshot. The worst part was the constant repetition of taking the photo, processing the photo, moving 1 frame forward, and then saving the image. Sometimes I would forget to do a step and have to start over completely. It was mind-numbing work to say the least!
The easiest way for me to create the video was to physically take a picture of the video (on a 4k monitor) using an iPad and save each photo directly to the iPad. Once all of the photos were taken, I used my PC workstation to directly pull the images off the iPad and onto a local hard-drive to continue the processing.
Thanks for watching!