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Click! Ultra-High-Speed Digital Camera
Polo writes: "Remember looking at those photos of bullets going through lightbulbs, apples and playing cards? Well, here is a fascinating digital camera from Visible Solutions that can capture images at over 1000 frames per second (with reduced resolutions up to 32000 fps!) The standard camera has 256M of memory to capture a whopping 2 seconds of video upgradeable to 1G to capture 8 seconds. You can also daisy-chain several cameras with firewire to capture an "event" from many angles. Here is the only slow-motion sequence on their site. What would you capture?" 1GB to capture 8 seconds -- sheesh! I'd like to see real slo-mo a little more affordable, but it takes extremes to create nice middles, eh?
This would be impossible since the issue with Astronomy is that you need more time to gather enough light to make up an image. Doing so in milliseconds would only give you a very black picture so you could get rid of the atmospheric distortion by take photos in the dark.
You'll do anything to rationalize your porn addiction.
How about home-brew software adaptive optics for astronomy ? Take video at the millisecond/frame speed, and each frame should be atmospheric distortion smear-free (of course it will still be distorted, but it won't have many different distortions superposed) Or is this just rubbish ? Is phase an important issue ?
You know what. There's a real high-tech invention for that: glasses.
Ok, ok, I've got a glass fetish. I probably got it from watching too much the early 90210 with the sexy but delightfully geeky Andrea. My world collapsed when she gave up her glasses later on in the series.
Oh please. Women in porn love to fuck and suck on camera. That is why they do it. *You* do more damage to women by standing them up on a pedestal. You could be mother teresa and still enjoy dick, you know.
Remember one thing, there are two things which determine maximum resolution, one of them affects film, and both affect digital cameras.
First, there is the question of size of tiny moments of the photograph. In traditional photography this is regulated by the size of the silver grain's on the paper, and on the optical precision of the lenses involved in the camera and development process. In digital photography it is controled by the ability to make a CDC (or similar technology) very small. Infact, the size of the little parts in a CDC are changing in a rapid manner similar to the transistor.
Digital photography has one downfall, we will soon be able to make a CDC which will get more points per inch than the data enclosed in a traditional photograph, yet, we can't store all of that information easily. Storing information digitally for an image is not very efficient, and requires much memory to store, where an analog signal can store either no information or tons of information in the same short wave. There is no theoretical limit to how much information can be encoded into an analog signal, but there are practical limits to how much information can be extracted from an analog signal.
There is not going to be much of a difference between digital photography and traditional photography in the near future.
Don't say I didn't warn you.
It's fine that it can take up to 32000 frames pr. second, but it also needs to write thoose 32000 frames, and correct me if i'm wrong but a digicam today spends a few secs saving each frame....so if the camera needs to save the images anywhere it will only be able to take a picture or two each second..... Then the remaining 29998 won't do any good when they aren't saved...
And even if you could save them you still don't have a harddrive which can save 256 megabytes in a second.... NO harddrive in the world is so fast...Even flashmemory etc. arent that fast....
Are you sure? Classifying an Intercontinetal Ballistic Missile as an assault weapon seems a stretch of imagination to me.
what nation is that?
_assault weapons_??
switzerland!
A program is a device used to convert data into error messages.
As long as women choose this over even the most dignified forms of poverty it will continue.
What would you prefer to do with your life. Star in Porn flicks where you have sex with whatever the director sends in and pretend to enjoy it for $500 a day ( wild guess ) or clean bathrooms for $250 a weak ?
These porn actresses have simply chosen one of the many forms of prostitution available pretty girls. Others exactly like them are standing on the corner all night or seducing the boss at work or marrying wealthy men they don't like.
I don't feel much sympathy. Not while she has options other than starvation.
BTW: What about the men in this business ? They are off whoring just like the women. Except that they make LESS. Reversing the trend that exists everywhere else.
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
That appears to be one use for it.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
This is kind of what was used during the filming of The Matrix. A cluster of high-speed digital cameras is placed around the perimeter of the object being filmed, in a semi-circle (or, hidden behind a green "blue screen", in a circle). It allowed them to "slow" time down, move the camera angle around 720 degrees, go "backwards" in time, etc. I suspect that's what this camera is designed for (especially considering the ability to daisy chain the cameras)...
--Be human.
I started writing that to be a smartass, but having given it a thought I bet it could be done, and cheaply enough to be feasible. Priced against RAM in those quantities, lots of stuff is cheap.
>I would...
>...take a picture of a snail moving accross the >ground at 32,000 frames per second.
How is this flamebait???!!?!
Actually snail movement is quite interesting.
But I don't think you would need 32,000 frames
per second to image that.
400 fps would be enough. The only problem is resolution however. The snail secreting its mucus
would be extremely intresting to watch up close.
Of course another thing that would be intresting to watch with snails is what they do on a hot frying pan.
And if you thought that this was a troll post, it's not. It's actually a weak attempt at humor.
The problem with conventional high-speed cameras is that they need protection gainst blast. If you don't mind losing the camera, you are only limited with electronic optics by the speed that you can get the image to remote storage!
There are pictures around of explosives going off.
I have not seen any on the net, but I saw a bunch of frames in a mag a few years ago that were of a "pineapple" grenade.
It was quite impressive, for the first few frames it just sits there (no pin, no paddle). Then the top of the grenade *dissapears* and it sits there for one or two frames more. Then the grenade body begins to expand and swell. The grenade actually becomes cylindrical, looking more like a can of soup than a grenade at this point. Then it fractures along the "pineapple" lines and begins to break up. There were no more frames than that. I would guess that the camera was destroyed at that point. (Or hopefully behind some VERY heavy glass).
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
Mr_Flibble:Heh, thats just what I need! An array of these cameras each with 1 GB of ram. Then you could fire bullets at me and I could have the movie pictures work just like the Matrix!!!
Slashdot:That won't work Flibble you know that was just special effects...
Mr_Flibble: Nonsense! I have a bunch of geeks here! ESR over there has one of his guns ready. We have the cameras up, this should rock!
Slashdot: Flibble I don' think that...
Mr_Flibble: Fire away Eric! (Make certain the cameras are rolling!
Slashdot:Wait, Flib's STOP!
ESR:BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG...
Mr_Flibble Crazyidiot@AOL.com Connection reset by peer...
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
Why did they orient the faucet sideways in that demo gif? I couldn't help but think that the pr0n industry is going to benefit from this technology immensly.
t t"
Ron Jeremy in slow mo:
"Sqqqqqqqqquuuuuuuuuuuuiiiiiiiiirrrrrrrrttttttt
Finely ground pepper does tend to make me sneeze, if I inhale it gently. The pepper must be fine enough to float in the air, though, like a little dust cloud. Most pepper grinders produce far coarser particles.
In my experience, the sneeze effect of inhaled pepper dust floating in the air is comparable to that of inhaled mustard flour floating similarly, and far greater than that of chalk dust.
Choice of masters is not freedom.
Oh fuck off, nobody forces them to be porno stars.
If i had a 6 pack and/or a giant 10" dick I'd be a pornstar myself. Why do you people insist that it's degrading? Are you so afraid of your own sexuality that you can't admit that people enjoy having sex, and a lot of people enjoy watching people enjoying having sex?
Bloody holier-than-thou attitudes.
Gfunk
Send lawyers, guns, and money!
couple the high speed cam with something that auto-detects microscopic changes in the facial expression and you have a super lie detector.... scary.
i think it would be endlessly interesting just to capture people talking and replaying that in super-slomo. be it the debates between the candidates or whatever....
The higher-end cameras are coming out with some interesting features. Here is a review of the olympus E100RS digital camera. It captures at 15 frames per second, but the cool thing is that it features pre-capture. I guess it continuously takes pictures to a buffer, then dumps them when you press the shutter button. You can take photos backwards in time!
aren't you confusing frame rate and shutter speed?
Like This? (exploding grenade photo near bottom of page)
Also interesting are These. (several high-speed photos - playing cards and fruits being shot)
These aren't video though - that would add an extra dimension.
Think of that X-Files simpsons episode...
It's so hipnotic.
Watch that blubber fly!
--
Laptop006 (RHCE: That means I know what I'm talking about! When talking about linux at least...)
/* FUCK - The F-word is here so that you can grep for it */
Watch Independence day... the explosion of the city was done with gasoline-laden air, filmed at very slow speed
Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Here are a few things I would like to see at about 4000 fps (if that would be enough):
1. A bullet being fired
2. A hand grenade being detonated
3. An underwater explosion (at high res, preferrably)
4. A stone being crushed under a train (Think about it: It would be quite cool)
5. CmdrTaco.
however, if it was a fairly predictable event, like a neighbor's sprinkler head getting blown off by water pressure (preferably while they work on it),
:-)
Hmmm. "fairly predictable"? It sounds like you know more about this than you're willing to share. I'm glad I'm not your neighbor
A dingo ate my sig...
Coincidentally enough, that's exactly what their demo animation looks like, only inoffensively, like how they always use blue liquid in diaper commercials. If any blue liquid ever emits from me or my loved ones we're going straight to the hospital, diaper or no diaper.
--
This is not my sandwich.
Gonna get me some Glasers for my home defense rounds, or at least for the next drunken family reunion. That looked fun!
--
This is not my sandwich.
I used one of these in a class at MIT, and the problem with the frame rates > 1000 is that the image is cut down proportionally. So at 3000 f/s, you only get 1/3 the image size (cut in third in one dimension). For 6000, thats 1/6!
We were shooting a pencil breaking, and we could just barely see it clearly at 3000fps, and it was pretty challenging to fit it into the 1/3 screen size.
"Of all days, the day on which one has not laughed is the most surely the one wasted." -Sebastian Roch Nicol
I'm assuming (I haven't done the math) that a hard drive probably couldn't keep up with the capture rate. Thus they have to stick to ram. Maybe some other in between memory might work (flash cards? how fast are they?)
"Of all days, the day on which one has not laughed is the most surely the one wasted." -Sebastian Roch Nicol
Apples and oranges, I know, but just imagine the possible implications for the gaming scene... Obsessives arguing over whether the human eye can tell the difference between 32,000 and 100,000 frames per second, full-screen anti-aliasing still causing a big performance hit -- down to 10,000 fps, the Voodoo7 criticized for only reaching 20,000 fps, the mind reels. Uh, sorry.
I wanna film a low b string on an electric bass
being plucked at the 12th fret (and other harmonic nodes)from a view behind the bridge and low with the bridge at the bottom of frame and the nut at the top of frame.Watch the pythagorian groove.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
I'm sure this camera is useful for science, but forget about it being used for movies (or even video). The "high" resolution images are only 512x512 pixels.
I really wish that Sony and some of the other DV camera makers would add high frame rate captures to their cameras. Nothing NEAR this fast, but just 45 or 60 frames a second, just to enhance the motion a bit (lot's of movies and commercials use slightly slowed down images for emotional effect). I know that DV can handle that speed (you can 2x and 4x speed dub tapes), and I know the CCD's can capture that fast (they go up to 1000th's of a second).
I happen to have an excess stock of high quality bats, and I could probably let them go for a pretty good rate assuming you buy the lot of them. I hate to think you're getting a raw deal on your bats after spending all that money on your camera. Contact me if you're interested.
XML causes global warming.
The sensor for this camera was made by the Belgian company FillFactory, a recent spin-off of the micro-electronics research facility IMEC
They have a range of sensor, but they can also design a sensor from scratch to your specifications
Not fast enough for WHAT?
Sounds pretty fast to me.
Did you bother to read the accompanying text?
I didn't think so.
Go eat mud and leave us alone.
read his post again, he said "for each 1GB shot, you can download the image to disk and shoot some more". This would be for after the first capture, before the second.
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
Of course, the digital sensors might still need a lot of light to work at higher speeds. Does anyone know for sure?
You seem to be a bit disappointed that it can only hold 8 seconds with the one gig upgrade.. firstly, what benefit do you gain from watching 8 seconds of video at 32,000 frames _per_ second ? Probably none... But here is the fun part, play it back at a regular 24/30 fps and you've got 1000 seconds/16 minutes or so of playback time .....
Its HELLUVA fun watching the hummingbird's wings at that fps :>
Its a helluva day to overuse the word helluva.
Is anyone else tired of all these people who talk about Beowulf clusters? They are nothing new and im still waiting on all the specs for Beowulf 2.
.02 cents
Just my
this is probably overkill for most of the stuff I'd like to do with high speed cameras, but here's my ideas:
web cams that have high enough frame rate to act as input devices to games and other apps. Replacing a mouse with gestures.
Sports simulations games where you actually use the real equipment, and the camera calculates precisely where the golf/tennis/baseball should go.
Eptesicus fuscus, Myotis septentrionalis, or Myotis lucifugus. I'll need a supply for my lab in England. (I did my dissertation on modeling bat behavior.)
Yes. It is now discontinued, at least for several years. The CCD-TR101 is a Hi8 single CCD camcorder which was considered the best single chip (short of industrial) Hi8 camera ever made. They're great little cameras with excellent picture quality.
Calum
Yeah, I must stand still and wait for the acquisition for nearly a full second with my good not-so-old Fujifilm FinePix 1700 Z if I want to have a non-null chance to get an acceptable still image.... So I'm eargerly waiting for this high-speed capture components to be available for normal still digital cameras...
-- javaDragon is an instance of JavaDragon.
Thanks for the lucid explanation.
Numbers 31:17,18 Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man,but save for yourselves every virg
I remember one day long ago wathcing a thing on TV about filming a golf club hitting a golf ball. If I remember corectly, they were filming at 10,000 fps. Do they make film cameras that go that fast, or did it have to be digital?
Numbers 31:17,18 Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man,but save for yourselves every virg
I'd film one of those deadlines, which make a wooshing sound as they fly by. Everyones talking about them, but I aint never sene one!
What, MIT has guns in school? How come the Mass. legislature lets that continue? Don't they know that some deranged engineer might climb into the clock tower and start picking off his fellow students?
</SARCASM>
"If I have seen further than other men, it is by stepping on their glasses." - Michael Swaine
I'd like to capture a vmstat on a server getting slashdotted
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keep in mind that 1 second of 32,000 fps video is equivilent to 16 minutes of 32 fps...so, even if they compressed it with mpg, 1 dv tape would hold at most 3.5 seconds...maybe 7 seconds with mpg4? im not sure of the ratio of mpg1 to mpg4. :-) i think im in love with a camera!
people where complaining it would only hold several seconds in gigabytes of memory....my point is that it was actually holding many minutes of normal playback...so if they were compressing all the frames, you would still have a MASSIVE amount of information
TRIPOD! The worst thing that can possibly happen to a slow-motion capture is a bad case of monkey-cam. Get those tripods, use them often!
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
couple the high speed cam with something that auto-detects microscopic changes in the facial expression and you have a super lie detector.... scary.
That wouldn't work very well with politicians. You'd need about two to three orders of magnitude more memory than a mere 1G, and have to design a filter that could repeatedly dump at high speed the more subtle lies to leave enough room for all the others.
A truly excellent pizza parlor is a delight unto the heavens. Treasure the sauce and the toppings!
With Extensive use of the 1gb feature it would make it self affordable, they use large ammounts of film for 8 seconds of slow motion, coupled with the ease of transfering digital media it makes this quite the nifty little tool. Car companies and the like will now have even faster tools when doing safty tests and such which will with out a doubt help (even if a little bit) the price of things.
Hmm... let me guess.. this MIT outreach program was for special education students??
CoRkEy LoVEs To BouNCe a BaLL!! YaY!!!!
Go here to see cameras capable of 20,000 fps, and others with up to 2k by 2k pixel resolution.
If you talk to Timeslice Films or Snell & Wilcox you might be able to license their software for a few grand for film-quality results.
It would be cool if these could accept a square wave input were able to take shots off phase. That way, you could have a master camera sending out a square wave and the other three taking shots at 1/4, 1/2, and 3/4 off phase effectively quadrupling your sample rate with four cameras or N-rupling your sample rate with N cameras.
One of the coolest uses of high-speed video for the average person is sports. Coaches/athletes could use the cameras to analyze technique, and fans could have a lot of fun with one of these at a football or hockey game -- more serious athletes, like gymnasts, golfers, and baseball players (to name just a few) could really make use of this to improve. Golfers already pay a lot of money for pros to tape their swing and do swing analysis for them.
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If you ever drop your keys into a river of molten lava, forget 'em, because man, they're gone. -- Jack
The reason for this was posted earlier. You can't write to a disk fast enough to record what the camera is feeding to memory at high frame rates (250k x 1,000 per second). This is one of the reasons the costs are up, and the users are few for this technology. It is a very small camera with internal memory options of up to gigabyte which is quite impressive.
Did anyone find a pricetag for these things?
Also is seem to remember reading about Steve Mann having a highspeed camera attached to his wearable. Supposedly it allowed him to read the writing on the tires of passing cars. Anyone got a link?
What's neat about this though is it gives you unlimited amounts of trials without worrying about having to set up your recording equipment every time, and spend shitloads on film. Say someone wants to observe a split second phenomenon in nature, they could use this camera to do their trials and get data to work with, then their 'master' version of the recording can be done on super high quality (expensive) film.
:)
I'd love to film a sneeze with this thing
Actually what you said struck a note with what this article had me thinking. They're only capturing 512x512 images, in greyscale, with the use of a strobe system that can keep up with that kind of frame rate.
I wonder how fast you could reprogram an off-the shelf camera to capture super low resolution greyscale...pretty damn fast I'm betting if you can get one of those things to run MAME. If you can take over the camera at a low enough level you could probably get it to go very fast at 512x512.
Then just hook up your strobe system and go. I haven't finished exploring their site but it really sounds like nothing more than the strobe doing the freezing (unlike in straight high-speed film where the shutter speed alone does the freezing) and then the digital camera just having to be able to write captures to disk as fast as the strobe can go.
And even if you can't hack the cameras that deep, with the crazy stuff PIC hackers are doing it can't be too long before some nutcase decides to create a do it yourself digital camera. Probably using the guts of a disposable camera. Hmmm....I need some napkins, I feel an idea coming on.
Seriously though I need to crunch some numbers and see just how much time it would take to do a stripped down streamlined capture at that resolution with an off the shelf CCD. I need to go find some spec sheets and my calculator.
--- Juggle juggle@hitesman.com
One thing we found was that a billiard ball bouncing off of industrial plastic tial flooring spends less than 1/6000 seconds on the ground and pulls many thousand Gs :-)
--Ben
But does it play well with Linux?
These fast cameras have been around for quite a while. For a long time (>10years) they were very expensive and did not improve much. We used an old Kodak Ektapro for a long time which apparently cost about $100k or so many years ago. Recently the market has heated up and we got the Kodak Motion Corder for a mere $30k a couple years ago. It has finally hit a price point where a lot of people doing research can afford them. I know quite a few people who have one in fact. Now that people can afford them, there is a significant market for them and they are quickly getting better and cheaper.
** LINUX **
I've been doing remote control and video download from Kodak Motion Corders(up to 10,000 frames/sec at reduced resolution) under Linux for almost two years. I wrote the serial communications and SCSI data transfer myself, including a GTK front end, which means it is fully functional, but just barely ;) You can download it here.
Interestingly, almost every person I've met who owns a Motion Corder is using my software under Linux instead of the DOS/Windows based software it ships with. In fact, the availability of Linux-based software was the reason a number of them chose this camera over the competitors.
Dan
The also used a very fast movie camera at the end (for instance, in the shot of neo dodging, right from behind him) because the camera "view" stays there. I think there were only something like 320fps or something like that
Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
The true geek will set up stop motion photography Web Cams in his home office, record himself coding, add in a cool techno soundtrack and stream it out to the world.
Maybe enchance it a litte and have his fingers dodge virtual bullets as they dance across the keyboard...
I wonder if OSHA has a standard for this...
--
This is not my sandwich.
I always wanted to see the flash point of any explosion, this will finally give me the ability to see it. The fact that it requires so much RAM is insane, but it makes sense 1000fps X 8 seconds = 8000images (depending on quality). I think it should come with a 40GB drive. That way for each 1GB shot, you can download the image to disk and shoot some more.
"Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality." -Jules de Gautier
Their camera can handle up to 1000 frames per second, now lets see if their web site can handle 1000 hits per second.
acm
I think it would be more realistic to imagine a Kodak Kluster of these things.
A toy for anyone who ever blows stuff up.. Potato cannons, grit trucks, exploding pumpkins.. All would be far cooler in ultraslomo :)
.88 magnum -- it goes through schools.
--
It's a
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It's a
-- Danny Vermin
Then again, perhaps they'll use this technology to examine the physics of a money shot so they can develop new techniques for keeping jism out of the pornstarlets' eyes.
Just another case of technology making the world a better place.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
But seriously, high-speed digital videos aren't as useful as high-speed film because film is at such a high resolution that the digital-ness of the new camera cannot offset it.
Tell me what makes you so afraid
Of all those people you say you hate
We use 240 frame per second infrared cameras to track bats in the flight room. They're expensive, and memory is the big issue, not just for the frame count, but also for the picture resolution. This looks interesting.
In fact, they've used electro-magneto shutters, to capture atomic bomb tests at a shutter speed of 1/1,000,000 of a sec.
I'm all for digital. It processes quicker, and is enviromentally clean, but whenever it hits a milestone, those who have never used the traditional media compare the two, and make us all look bad.
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
Feminists who oppose porn are hypocrits. The women in porn CHOOSE to do what they do for a living, and are VERY well compensated for it (they make much more than the men, by the way). Why does having sex reduce a women to a piece of meat? Perhaps your the one reducing her.
Numbers 31:17,18 Now kill all the boys. And kill every woman who has slept with a man,but save for yourselves every virg
I saw this on TV (or HBO?)
These (or such like) cameras can be arranged to circumference the action scene and then the images from consecutive cameras can be put in a timeline to make a movie of a bullet slicing a playing card while the viewer goes "around" the scene. Also it may be possible to super slow the instance where the bullet starts piercing and as the viewer goes around at 30 fps, take the bullet out super fast! a la Trinity doing that kick.
Have you ever noticed subliminally very fleeting expressions on the faces of people who've just been surprised? For instance, consider the expression on the face of a guy who is suddenly surprised with the news that his expensive imported sports car has just been towed and accidentally sent to the crusher, where large bags of white powder spurted out their contents just before the huge metal lid crashed down on the car once and for all. A camera like this could get that expression.
It could also get the fleeting expression on the face of a man who comes home late and is suddenly shocked by his suspicious wife who has just returned early from a business trip, and who abruptly asks him where's he's been. A camera like this could capture a very brief, but weird expression that could upon later, leisurely (but not loving, no indeed) attention prove to be very incriminating.
Personally, I'd like to see this used to capture really cool candid expressions on the faces of political candidates, when they think they're off camera. Heh-heh ....
A truly excellent pizza parlor is a delight unto the heavens. Treasure the sauce and the toppings!
Or imagine how well you'll be able to capture the fear and grief in the woman's eyes as she gets pounded and pounded, her lids fluttering and her pupils growing, dilating, her world coming down about her ears as she is converted into raw flesh, flesh made raw by friction, oh the friction, youth liquefied and sold to the highest or lowest bidder, exploding and fading, left to die inside but patted and reassured with a fist of twenties. Just imagine.
-- Anne Marie
At 1G of ram, how long until someone slaps on an lcd screen and ports MAME to it? Digdug never had it so good.
-- Anne Marie
Since you can daisy chain the cameras, you could do those effects were the camera seems to rotate around a still image. Just arrange your cameras around the image, set them to fire at once (Or near once) and you could probably use a morphing program (like xmorph) to get the in between frames. Cool!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
In 1988, I used a Kodak EktaPro system to capture 6,000 frames/second of high-speed video while developing weapons systems. The base speed of the machine was 1,000 frames/second and could be bumped to 6,000 split frames/second if you used the LASER strobe for illumination. Resolution was 192 X 240 with gate limits as low as 10sec.
We were able to capture reasonably detailed images of transient events with up to thirty seconds in the buffer. The system cost $65k at the time. Maybe this one is cheaper.
The EktaPro was developed in San Diego at a company later purchased by Kodak.
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."
-- Pablo Picasso
He's using a fairly cheap Sony "Handycam" to do his filming, the model he names is the TR-101 hi8. Having problems finding that specific model online, so it may be discontinued. But the Sony cam line runs from anywhere between $500 and $5000. Check out this link to get a pretty detailed explanation of how he makes his movies.
If nothing else, click around on the dude's movies. A ton of fun to watch. :) These aren't superior quality movies, but you can see what happens to stuff when it gets shot with a high power weapon, which is rather entertaining.
Since the porn industry is usually an early adopter of new technologies, I can just imagine the type of slow motion money shots that are gojng to start showing up in porns now. Eww.
A long time ago, my friend hacked together a high-speed film camera using school equipment and tried to film a firecracker (small explosive) blowing up a plastic army man. I seem to recall the film went something like this in playback:
frames 0 to 5000: Static shot of army man with firecracker strapped to it
frame 5001 to end: nothing in picture
Speed was nowhere near high enough.
I am currently taking a class in high speed photography at MIT (6.163, or strobe lab), and the cheaper, but not necessarily easier, way is to use a strobe light to flash the event so that it is frozen in time.
The idea is that your strobe needs to be about 10x brighter than the ambient light (at least). The other alternative is to be in the dark. Then you open the shutter, flash the strobe when you want it, and then close the shutter. The event will be "frozen" when ever you flashed the strobe.
This, of course, requires a camera with a "bulb" setting so you can leave the shutter open. But its pretty neat. We've done the "shooting the card sideways" shot just recently. Its pretty cool to actually see the event (not just on a photograph!)
"Of all days, the day on which one has not laughed is the most surely the one wasted." -Sebastian Roch Nicol