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Comment by jiofih | Hacker News Reader

Focus stacking is indeed done with a DSLR most of the time. You cannot get nearly enough DOF at this scale with any kind of lens.

The author can do it from video because he has a 6K camera, and that is actually way easier compared to manually taking 160 separate shots + changing focus for each of them (you need specialized hardware for that, most cameras will give you a dozen shots at most due to coarse focus increments).

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How do you figure? You take a single image, then move the camera or adjust focus, lather, rinse, repeat. In video, you do the same thing, except now you have to process each video clip to get export the single frame.

As someone with extensive experience in doing what you're describing with a DSLR, the video option sounds like a wonderful shortcut and I've wondered if it was possible to do it with my current equipment.

Oh, now I see why you’d think that. That would be insane.

No, you record a single video while moving focus and export each frame - that’s what makes it easier.

> The camera itself is mounted on an old edelkrone slider with a motion module. I record short 4K ProRes422HQ clips and use them for focus stacking directly in helicon focus. For this fly I used an average of 160 frames [from one clip]

Did you read the article?

"I record short 4K ProRes422HQ clips and use them for focus stacking directly in helicon focus. For this fly I used an average of 160 frames."

Clearly, he recorded multiple clips, and then exported individual frames from individual clips.

After all of that, he didn't even record in RAW.

"Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that.""

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Also, can you please make your criticisms thoughtfully rather than as shallow dismissals or snark? Your comments in this thread are rather on the wrong side of the line, starting with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26427684. You obviously know a lot about this topic, which is great, but the thing to do with that knowledge is share some of it, so the rest of us can learn, and leave out the putdown aspect.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

Why the aggressiveness? If you want to believe that, be my guest.

This is a film production company, they most certainly have a stack of DSLRs they could use it it was that much more convenient, and with much better resolution. Not sure why you’d assume stupidity.

The software supports importing videos directly: https://m.facebook.com/heliconsoft/photos/new-version-of-hel...

As for RAW, unless you need that bit of extra dynamic range, it makes no difference (they don’t here, as it’s a studio shot with fully controlled lighting), ProRes422 is enough for 10-bit HDR even.

He says he records short clips and uses 160 frames from them. I don't see why you'd choose to read it as "recorded one video per depth".

And sure, it's not raw, but ProRes422HQ is pretty damn good, being both high pixel depth and very high bitrate.

This has to be the method. It makes the most sense given the strengths of a 6K video camera. Record lots of frames and use a dolly to take focus slices of the subject.

Processing 160 (or more, many many more) RAW files is much more of a pain in the neck than just taking the time to get everything right in camera and dealing with the jpegs.

Eh, my computer can deal with a RAW file in less than a second on one core, wouldn't be that big a deal.

Plus, a lot of RAW files are TIFF, so I'm sure GPU-accelerated stacking is in reach.

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