Over prepare!
Please don’t underestimate the amount of preparation you need to make a successful first bullet-time event. If you don’t prepare, you are going to fail. You need to spend some time with your equipment to practice and master every step of the process.
As specified in the license terms, the support is provided through our online documentation. If you need one-to-one support, you can get this from here, but this has to be arranged well in advance.
We go in details with pretty much everything in the documentation, but here's a quick checklist:
- Camera setup
- All camera models should be the same
- Zoom out all lenses
- Make sure you are in manual mode (using the dial on top of the camera)
- From the software, set a specific white-balance and iso value from the software (nothing should be on manual)
- Disable auto-power off on all cameras
- Check with the venue to make sure you have enough power to run your whole system. Keep in mind that there is a power request spike when you trigger (which can cause all cameras to disconnect). Split the power in multiple drops if needed
- Test your installation with a missing camera (turn off any of the cameras and do a test shot). You can rarely replace or recalibrate a camera when you're live. It's better to be prepared for this eventuality and know what the end result would be like (especially when you're using an animated background or foreground)
- Computer setup
- Turn off any automatic Windows updates
- Turn off wifi if you don't need it
- Make sure you are running at full power (click on the battery icon)
- Never run on battery
- Turn off sleep / hibernate
- Calibration
- Make sure that your markers are easy to read for our calibration system (yellow markers on black background)
- Make sure that the center marker is more or less at the center of the framing
- Media sharing
- Check that your SMTP service properly setup (please don't use gmail)
- Check the duration of your final mp4 files to make sure that it is long enough for Instagram sharing (above 3 seconds). Add more repeats if necessary ("duration" button from the dashboard)
- Make sure that the files you are sharing by email are not too heavy, otherwise they are going to be blocked. Gmail limit is 25MB. Try to keep the attachment file size to 8MB max
- Additional elements
- Do you have a backup of everything? Always make sure you can either replace any failing piece of equipment. What's more likely to fail are cables, power adapters and micro-sd cards (if you're using Rasbperry Pis)