Slashdot Mirror
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?
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
--
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
W/r/t tripods and stability, you may be thinking of timelapse photography, where the opposite applies. Tripods are absolutely required for timelapse photography.
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