This summer, New Yorkers who happened to be around Lincoln Center were able to see Slow Dancing, a fascinating video installation of an eclectic mix of 45 top-level dancers whose often lightning-speed movements were slowed down to 1/100th of their actual duration, allowing viewers to take in facets of movement that even most professional dancers have previously not observed. The brainchild of commercial portraitist David Michalek, whose photography has appeared in the pages of magazines including Vogue and Vanity Fair, the installation came into being because of his fascination with dance (his wife is ballerina Wendy Whelan) and his frustration with capturing the essence of beautiful choreography in a still photograph.

Michalek’s idea was to shoot dancers engaged in a variety of styles: tap, modern, break dancing and others from throughout the world. He would have them prepare and perform a single five-second “phrase” for a high-speed motion picture camera; he would then project the take at normal speed, allowing the five seconds of movement to creep by at such a slow rate that tiny muscular ripples or shifts in balance could be detected. He did his calculations and concluded that the ideal camera would run at an astounding 3,000 frames per second.

His search for a suitable camera eventually took him to the Phantom HD camera from Vision Research. With a 14-bit, 2048x2048-pixel CMOS sensor and a shutter speed adjustable to as fast as 1/500,000th of a second, the Phantom camera was designed with sports and military uses in mind. It takes standard PL-mount lenses, allowing Michalek to use ARRI/Zeiss optics designed for cinematography. The camera can capture up to 1,000 frames per second in the 1920x1080 configuration that Michalek used. At lower resolutions, it can go even faster.

Michalek was very happy with the result—except that 1,000fps just wasn’t fast enough, so he used RE:Vision Effects Twixtor and Apple Shake’s optical flow feature to time remap the images and interpolate the new frames needed to synthesize the look of a scene caught at 3,000fps.

With this task complete, it was time to figure out how to project the work onto the 50-foot screens for the outdoor installation. Josh Weisberg of video/audio/lighting specialists Scharff Weisberg oversaw the creation of the projection setup, which made use of three Barco FLM HD18 1920x1080, 18,000-lumen projectors. The clips themselves resided on three Apple Power Mac computers connected to an Xserve array.

The project also made use of technology from IRIDAS to allow for uncompressed playback and color correction. Since the show would be seen outside at different times and in different conditions, it was important to be able to make subtle adjustments to the color on the fly. Their SpeedGrade system, which creates nondestructive .Look files, was used to set a color grade for post. A customized edition of the FrameCycler VenueSystem allowed for playback and nondestructive real-time color adjustments during exhibition.

The Lincoln Center installation was by all accounts extremely well received, and Slow Dancing is expected to appear at similar venues in other cities, starting in Los Angeles in September.

For more information, read Apple's profile of David Michalek and Slow Dancing and the Slow Dancing Web site.