a new high speed camera?

[rich]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16163931

[jacefivesound]

I've been fortunate enough to work in the media lab before, it's an absolutely amazing place. Also, we're going to need more light.

[Marc Wielage]

A trillion frames a second?

I wanna see how many hard drives this will take to hold. I hope they don't need sync sound with this...

--Marc W.

[Philip Perkins]

Bad enough w/the Phantom Flex. DIT asked for slate claps at the beginning and end of takes because the camera drifted off sync so quickly @ 24. (That's 24.00, not 23.98.)

phil p

[Marc Wielage]

I remember the old Photosonics high-speed film cameras. I seem to recall working on a Mercedes commercial in the late 1990s where I think they ran 1000 frames a second to show an air-bag going off in the steering wheel. It took about 200 feet just for the camera to get up to speed!

Here's what bullet impacts look like at 1,000,000 frames per second:

[David Waelder]

Those are some impressive images.

A million frame rate is incredibly fast. I used to do high speed jobs so I appreciate how it becomes exponentially more difficult as the frame rate moves above about 1000 frames. Getting sufficient light on the subject is the biggest challenge followed closely by not melting the subject from the heat from the lights. On one assignment where I had to use speeds of 2000 frames and 4000 frames I found using an incident meter was impossible. I needed to use a spot meter to read the subject but it was so bright that I needed to fit an ND 0.9 filter on the meter to avoid overloading it. An 18% gray card placed at the subject position would begin to smoke within two seconds.

That high a rate is beyond the range of even prism cameras. Briefly, 500 fps is about the upper limit of an intermittent movement. No one I know makes a camera that can start and stop film more rapidly than 500 times per second. To get higher rates, the cameras employ a rotating prism, similar to what is used in editing machines like the KEM and Steenbeck. A big motor pulls the film from one reel to the other and the film sprockets pull a rotating prism that throws the images on the passing film. With that sort of mechanism one can get several thousand fps. The HiCam is the fastest example of that breed that I know of and it can only reach 10,000 or 11,000 fps. And I could never get enough light to get an exposure at any rate above 4000 fps. Switching the camera on causes a 400 foot roll of 16mm film to disappear in only a few seconds.

To get up around 1,000,000 frames one has to use a drum camera. That's a very large and cumbersome device that is often built into a building. One would be more likely to bring the subject to the camera than the camera to the subject. The film is strung in a spiral around the inside of a big drum. A rotating prism is mounted to a threaded pin so that it moves sideways even as it is spinning. This permits it to track with the spiral film wrap so that the images are directed sequentially along the film. With this system, the film is entirely stationary; only the prism moves.

More than you wanted to know, maybe, but interesting stuff.

David

[cmgoodin]

The BBC story is a bit of an exaggeration.. It is really just a post trick to simulate a trillion frames per second. It takes more than an hour to capture the short 10 second video. Where normal High speed photography is the opposite. It would take only a few seconds of High speed exposure to capture a 1 hour movie (if played back at normal speed) . If you read the complete story about the technique it will only work on repeatable mechanical actions that can be synchronized to the scan in the camera and only a small portion of the frame is captured with each repeat of the action. So it can't really be used to reveal any brief random actions like bomb explosions or bullet impacts. Those are not repeatable. This is just a laser based version of slit scan photography like Doug Trumbull used in 1967 to capture the stargate sequence in 2001 a Space Odyssey.

[Marc Wielage]

Just caught a screening of Sherlock Holmes tonight, and the ultra-slow-mo fight scenes, bullet hits, and cannon explosions were among the highlights of the movie. Beautiful mix, too, and excellent dialog throughout.

--Marc W.