[justjash]

This seems like a very difficult way to do things unless you really needed to mess with items in the background.

I would think there is still plenty of room to crop a single image down from something like a new Canon 1D. Even just making a composite image if really needed sounds much easier.

[masona]

That's what the photographer was shooting and it is definitely not big enough to pull back and crop in later.

The only way to get files big enough is to shoot medium format, but you can't because the files are too large for rapid-fire.

[pbhjpbhj]

1D (XII or XIII) is 20Mpx (at 20fps), curious what resolution you're printing the actual packaging at given this isn't enough.

I've done some packaging production for a micro-business - it would be really interesting to see how it's done at a large company from taking photos through to final product.

[masona]

The resolution is fine if you're in close like we were. But then you lose out on the room details which were needed the final composition, hence the CGI extension. The resolution is only a problem if you shoot pulled back and then try to crop in later.

[deckard1]

This really sounds like a use case for an anamorphic lens. Sure, it's a bit exotic for DSLR photography. But it certainly sounds like you had the budget for it.

[shard]

Could you clarify what you mean by rapid-fire? Are you talking about burst shots? What fps do you need and why?

[masona]

It's not about fps, though the shutter was really fast since babies move a lot. That was hard to balance with the lighting because we couldn't fire strobes since it would freak them out.

Basically we were shooting a lot of captures really fast (but not quite burst shots) to get the perfect facial expression. Medium format camera digital back files are so huge that they can't cycle that fast. As it was, the photographer's team had to set up a system that got jpegs and RAWs at the same time: the jpegs were radioed into Capture One for immediate review, while the RAWs went to card and were imported afterwards. It was amazing to watch the team work. We had 30k captures after 5 days of shooting - it was a beast to edit down to 27 final shots.

[shard]

It sounds like a memory card write speed limitation, is that correct? I've seen medium format cameras advertised with 5fps bursts (not sure on burst length), but if it takes 30 seconds between bursts to write to the memory card, that would drastically slow down the capture rate.

[masona]

Exactly. The thing is, even shooting tethered with medium format, the pipe just isn't big enough to keep up and the computer and/or capture software gets bogged down, too.