A Seriously High Speed Video Camera (Video)

Mike Matter was showing off his edgertronic (named after Harold Eugene "Doc" Edgerton) high speed video camera at O'Reilly's inaugural Solid conference, when Tim Lord happened by his little show booth and started interviewing Mike with his normal speed camcorder. While Tim's camcorder shoots 720p at 30 or 60 frames per second, the edgertronic video camera shoots 720P at 700 frames per second, and can shoot lesser resolutions at up to 18,000 frames per second. But the big breakthrough here isn't performance. It's price. Most high-speed video cameras cost $20,000 to $50,000 (or even more), while Mike's edgertronic starts at a mere $5,495.00. This is still a little steep for hobby photographers, but is not bad for a tool used by professionals. And Kickstarter? You bet! Last year Mike raised $170,175, which was much more than his $97,900 goal. Now he's busy making and shipping cameras, working so many hours that he doesn't have time for his own photography. But sometimes that's the way life goes, and Mike seems to be handling it well. (Alternate Video Link)

Comments

Kerr cell shutter?

[Anonymous Coward]

The camera will have some good applications but I'm more interested in the proprietary shutter technology. Is that a Kerr cell or something new?

Re:Kerr cell shutter?

[Em Adespoton]

More likely it's using cells as always on, and sampling the signal strength directly with a clocked chip. At that point, your sampling speeds depend on how quickly the cells can change state and how fast you can offload the sampled data.

Based on the product's name, he's probably also making use of stroboscopic properties in interpretation by the sampling software to minimize the amount of data required to be handled in the offloading process.

The cells he's using could be taking advantage of the kerr effect to increase the number of cells in a usable state at any given moment and thus increase the sampling speed accordingly, but he could also just be using fast cells, or use a holographic system, or any other number of methods of assigning cell sets per sample.

He could even be using slow cells, and taking advantage of the stroboscopic effect in software to approximate the actual potential any cell should have if its actual potential and those of nearby cells has not changed since the prior sample.

Interesting, no matter which method he used. And something that's actually worth patenting and licensing the patent for.

Where's the video link?

[timeOday]

This is a nice interview and all, but a story about a high-speed camera absolutely demands some cool high-speed footage of china shattering or a face getting punched or something.

Only 5000 bucks?

[MindPrison]

Woah, that's cheap! Can you feel the wind beneath your wings? That's the customers rushing towards wallmart to buy one right now.

I can remember a Casio camera that could take 1200 images per second in 2002, and it was a cheap consumer camera, here is the Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

Sure, it's not 18.000 FPS...but the price/fps ratio. meh...

Re:Only 5000 bucks?

[asmkm22]

1200 images per second at a resolution of 336x96... That was a low resolution even for 2002.

Re:Only 5000 bucks?

[Jeremy Erwin]

According to the wikipedia page-- which doesn't appear to free from errors, Casio's high speed exlims date from 2008 (Pro EX-F1) and later. Moreover, the resolution at high speeds is significantly reduced-- 336*96 @ 1200 fps for one model, 224*64 @ 1000 fps for another.

This camera also degrades video: but manages 866*720@1000, 640*480 @1849, and for the gimickry obsessed, 192*96 @ 17791.

Re:Only 5000 bucks?

[Splab]

"I went to see Professor Douglas Hartree, who had built the first differential analyzers in England and had more experience in using these very specialized computers than anyone else. He told me that, in his opinion, all the calculations that would ever be needed in this country could be done on the three digital computers which were then being builtâ"one in Cambridge, one in Teddington, and one in Manchester. No one else, he said, would ever need machines of their own, or would be able to afford to buy them."
-- Douglas Hartree

There are billions of smart people out there, just because you fail to see a purpose doesn't mean there isn't one, it just means you aren't the one making it rich in this niche.

Re:Only 5000 bucks?

[Dishevel]

You are off there by a bit. The run about 18,000 FPS at that resolution. They get 1850 FPS at 640x480.

Re:Flash, again?

[Jeremy Erwin]

Hit the alternate link, or read the transcript. But yeah, I couldn't view the embedded link on my ipad, which is how I read slashdot half the time.

Re:Not exactly needed

[GrahamCox]

Then we can put them on light poles and get good high-resolution courts-evidence-quality images of the people who are running out of nowhere to attack you, beat you senseless, and stealing your $500 bicycle when neighborhood is quite 100% gentrified yet.

Your "vision" of the future is one I find creepy and chilling. It's what's already happening, and on the face of it (your argument) seems reasonable. Until the wrong people are fingered and framed, the fact that you cannot move without your every step being filmed and tracked, you get a knock-on-the-door-in-the-night from the goon squad because you were caught on camera dropping litter. It's a very very slippery slope. Personally I'll take my chances with the muggers and bike-stealers (in real terms, crime is lower than it has ever been at any time in history per head of population), if it means that we don't build such a nightmare panopticon.

Re:A Dice Idea

[Roblimo]

All the people who actually work on Slashdot agree with you. And we've been promised HTML5 "soon." Sigh.

Completely off topic

[Anonymous Coward]

I really hope Tim's middle initial is an E.

Re:Flash, again?

[Blaskowicz]

I happen to like flash technology. Hell, it's less CPU intensive than html5 + javascript crap or maybe that's because it supports a video codec much less CPU hungry than H264. Used as in the Pentium 1 and Cyrix days it's also a very good platorm for animated and optionally interactive vector graphics (similar to the good old Another World/Out of this World game). Animated PNG and animated SVG were a failure I think.

Open source / Free software world failed to make a good enough clone, except as a toy project to run antique flash objects stored in off-line folders.
It could have worked out better. Hell, a decade ago slashdot was littered with "warning! pdf link" and "pdf is evil".

Re: Not exactly needed

[Roblimo]

A bowling alley or instructor might be a valid customer for this camera. Too pricey for you or a dozen like you, but spread it out over hundreds of users, it might make sense. Or possibly set up a "sports motion analysis" business that can be at a bowling alley tonight, a golf course tomorrow, a baseball practice facility next week, and so on.

Like you could tell the difference between 60fps

[ayesnymous]

and 700-18000 fps. Plus some people even get motion sickness from 120 Hz TVs. Wonder how they'd fare watching a 700 fps video?

Re:Like you could tell the difference between 60fp

[PhunkySchtuff]

Can't tell if serious or trolling.

These cameras are used for slowing things down. You shoot at, say, 600 frames per second and then you can slow it down by 20 times to 30 fps. Watching the video at 30 fps then shows a very smooth slow-motion view of what's happening 20 times faster. One of the examples he gave was in process manufacturing - if you have an assembly line that's jamming at a point, and you can't see why as it's all happening too quickly, shoot it at a high frame rate, slow it down and go over it frame by frame if you need to. Either that or make videos of stuff breaking, getting shot or having water splashed on it and put it on youtube. People love seeing that stuff in slow motion.