Digital Video Capture and High Frame Rates?

Jeff asks: "So the folks at a place called Conniption Films (great name) developed a camera called the Millisecond Camera which can shoot 12,000 frames of film a second. I read the article and thought 'Hmm that's neat' but then realized they were still using an analog process for shooting this highspeed film. Being a geek, not necessarily into the film side of things but curious nonetheless, I wonder, shouldn't a computer be able to do a better job of such a thing? They say the film runs around a spindle going 500 mph (!). Wouldn't that be prone to failure and use alot of energy? Wouldn't it be more appropriate, easier, and overall cheaper to just hook up a high res CCD to a beowulf </duck> cluster of 2 ghz+ machines and capture high speed images that way? Why hasn't it been done yet? Or has it and I haven't seen it yet?" I did a double-take, when I first read this question, and then got curious and did a little digging. Turns out, high frame rates are not exclusive to the analog photography world, and to illustrate my point, I provide this link. It's woefully short on details, and the explanations as to why a camera that can record 1M frames per second is limited to a playback of only 103 frames, but the technology is out there. Has anyone seen any other digital cameras out there with high frame-rates? What visual mischief could you aspiring photographers get into with such a camera?

Comments

Cliff, did you READ it?

[MadCow42]

The explanation as to why it can only play back 103 frames is QUITE clear... the chip has 103 "on-chip" memory buffers per sensor, and they get cyclicly overwritten with the last 103 frames.

This overcomes the bottleneck of trying to transfer data off the CCD at such high frame rates in real time, but limits you to "downloading" the last 103 frames after-the fact from the chip.

MadCow.

CCD

[The Moving Shadow]

CCD simply needs a few milliseconds to regain their 0-volt signal level again before they can emit a new pulse. This recoverytime makes it unsuitable for high speed filming. Helas.

12,000 FPS isn't a breakthrough

[Animats]

You can rent an 11,000 FPS camera right now, for $200 per day. Photek makes a camera that can reach 40,000 FPS, although only with 8mm film frame size. Rotating-prism cameras like this have been around since at least the 1940s. The film advances continuously, and a rotating prism synchs the image to the moving film. Typically the synchronization has been mechanical, which means major problems at very high speed. An obvious upgrade to current technology is to feed the film with rollers or air jets rather than sprockets, detect the sprocket holes or some other form of clock track, and synchronize the rotating mirror prism electronically.

On the pure digital front, there are units that can record 1000 FPS continuous at 512 x 512 pixels. The system is data-rate limited. The imager can go much faster; if you cut the image size down to 32x128 pixels, you can get 32K frames/sec. At 128 x 128, you can get 11.2K frames/sec. The data goes into a buffer in the control unit (1 GB, typically), and is read out via FireWire. So this system can take a lot more frames than the device described in the article, which stores the images in memory within the imager and can only store 100 images or so.