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?

Comments

Yeah!

[Greyfox]

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!

This is nothing new

[BobandMax]

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."

Poor man's slow-mo movies:

[Xzzy]

Check out the work some fellow has done over at this website.

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.

Re:Matrix like effects

[bonzoesc]

The Matrix used a bunch of still cameras arranged in the correct shape to pull that one off. The cameras had their positions selected by a computer, fired by a computer, and they used a computer to do the background and interpolation between the still images. They really don't need a bunch of movie cameras because they already knew what path the viewer would follow.

Tell me what makes you so afraid
Of all those people you say you hate

Money Shots

[merchant_x]

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.

My friend tried this once

[3prong]

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.

there is another way

[Bullschmidt]

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!)