Expert: Andrew Ransavage - 7/5/2011

Question
Stunning video effect created in a program on Discovery.
A video showing flock of birds on a water body. Disturbance created by a predator and birds fly. The video which is in relatively wide angle view(accommodating close to 50 birds) gets paused, and the frozen video frame is zoomed in to the extent where a single birds beak and eyes are visible with limited quality degradation. Next, water being splashed by the bird gets highlighted. The amazing part is throughout this transition, the angle of view of the subject(bird) gets changed.

My questions are,
1. What would be the technique used to maintain the quality of close up image.
2. How the view angle change is possible in a still image.

Hope my question is clear.

Thanks
Mayoor

Answer
The short answer is with alot of cameras. The only way to change the angle of the view is to switch to another camera.  Often times there may be dozens of cameras involved and special software that splices or interpolates the transistion from one to the next during the paused angle change you referred to.

Check out this site which does the same technique for Ikea:

http://demo.fb.se/e/ikea/dreamkitchen2/site/default.htm