How do they film scenes where the camera moves around a room, but all of the occupants are seemingly “frozen”?

Question

**The Other Guys** found its way onto Netflix again recently and I rewatched it for the nth time. When Allen goes “drinking with Terry Hoitz”, [this scene catalogues their experience](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l80mHMmJzr0). I’ve seen this technique before but I can’t figure out how its accomplished. ELI5?

In: 242

Answer 1

A movie is a series of still images taken over time.

That camera might also be moving, such as on a car, or rail, or boom, so you have a series of still images taken over time and space…

You could imagine if you could move the camera fast enough, you could freeze time… almost.

Instead of moving one camera, setup 2, or 3, or 50 cameras along the path and then splice frames that were taken at the same instant (or in rapid succession)

Now a days, things have gotten so smart, you can use algorithm to fill in large gaps between cameras. NFL uses this technology to pan around the stadium despite not having cameras at every angle around the perimeter. They do it in near real time, if you have some post processing time, you can make it nearly perfect without needing a multimillion dollar camera array.