Hi Speed HD

Astronaut wrote on 1/30/2006, 6:16 AM
I just shot a TV-ad using a Weinberger SpeedCam. It’s a high-speed camera used primarily for industrial testing (car crash tests, explosions etc) but it has excellent picture quality as well.

The camera we used (MiniVis) records 1280x1024 at up to 500 fps. You can increase speed up to 30.000 fps by lowering resolution. It records directly into camera memory, but you can preview through a laptop. You then have to transfer the clip to the laptop, which takes a couple of minutes. Not an ideal way to work, but it’s worth it…

It’s a commercial for a Swedish sporting goods retailer (it’s not launched yet so I’ve removed all logos and offers). Take a look:

http://www.astronaut.se/HiSpeedDemo.mov


You can find the camera (and links to dealers worldwide) at:

http://www.weinbergervision.com/

We rented the camera from the Swedish dealer for about $1.500 for one day including operator. And you need a lot of light…

Good Luck!
/Magnus

Comments

jkrepner wrote on 1/30/2006, 6:34 AM
Magnus, that looked great - nothing beats in-camera slow motion.

What frame rate was that?
Astronaut wrote on 1/30/2006, 6:40 AM

This was 500 fps

We're shooting 8 more films like this one, and I think we can go up to 1000fps before resolution gets below PAL. We just didn't have enough lights this time...

/M
jkrepner wrote on 1/30/2006, 6:49 AM
Wow 500fps! I can't imagine how much light you'll need to shoot 1000fps.
Was the shallow depth of field a byproduct of opening the aperture up all of the way to gain enough light to shoot 500fps?

I love that look. Nice one.

Jeff

Astronaut wrote on 1/30/2006, 6:58 AM
The aperture was open all the way, but It's also because the camera uses real 35mm still lenses and not crappy DV-stuff. I think the CCD is a lot bigger than on a regular video camera, and that gives the shallow dof.
If it would have looked like it was shot with a DV-camera it would probably look a lot less cool, and be pretty uselsess as a commercial...

And the camera is progressive too. Really nice gadget.

/M
jkrepner wrote on 1/30/2006, 7:10 AM
Do you have any idea what price the MiniVis sells for?
Astronaut wrote on 1/30/2006, 7:28 AM

About 200.000 SEK = 22.000 Euro = $27.000 (+VAT). But then you have a pretty good camera at 24, 25 or 30 fps as well...

This is the smallest of the Weinberger cameras. The others are supposed to have even better colours and higher resolutions.

/M
jkrepner wrote on 1/30/2006, 8:08 AM
All things considered, that's not such a ridiculous price. I wonder if one owned it they could get enough jobs (or rentals) to justify it?


Astronaut wrote on 1/30/2006, 8:12 AM
My thoughts as well...
Coursedesign wrote on 1/30/2006, 9:25 AM
Totally fabulous concept, it gives an illusion of speed that is far better than if the camera had been undercranked. Beautifully shot too.

This is hot! Heja Sverige!

B_JM wrote on 1/30/2006, 7:35 PM
really great effect that method .....
farss wrote on 1/31/2006, 1:46 AM
I looked into buying something similar at around USD 45K but then discovered someone else already had one in the country and one is more than enough.
The camera itself isn't that expensive, it's the huge amounts of incredibly fast RAM. We were looking at being able to store minutes at 500fps and yes it can be done, eight light pipes to an enourmous disk array.
I've also noticed some ex military high speed 35mm cameras going cheap on eBay but at 1000fps how long does a roll of film last and what's it going to cost?
Bob.
Astronaut wrote on 1/31/2006, 2:25 AM

I think we had 6 seconds recording time@500fps. That translates to 2 minutes at 25 fps (PAL). For most high speed situations, that seems like plenty. What were you planning to do, Bob?

/Magnus
farss wrote on 1/31/2006, 4:21 AM
We'd had a number of enquiries from people doing materials testing and studying fast moving machinery. Problem I saw was we'd get about two uses for the gear a year which means it just isn't an economic proposition. Kind of a pity, I built a sound trigger for a flash gun decades ago and we got some great stills of bullets going through light bulbs etc and I'd have loved to do that with full motion.
One of the best ones I've seen is a balloon full of water bursting, not what I expected to see in the first few milliseconds, the surface tension between the rubber and the water causes water to spray out, freaky.
Bob.
johnmeyer wrote on 1/31/2006, 11:33 AM
And, of course, there is the ultimate high-speed camera ever built, by non other than "Doc" Edgerton, the inventor of the strobe and MIT legend. It had a shutter speed of one billioneth of a second and was used to film the first few nanoseconds of an atomic explosion. See it here:

A-Bomb Explosion

There is also a movie version of this, taken at even closer range. It is one of the eeriest things I have ever seen.

I don't know how much it rents out for ...

[Edit] Here's a fascinating discussion of the movie version of this technology that recorded several million frames per second.

Million fps camera

farss wrote on 2/4/2006, 4:15 PM
A visit to the Cordin Camera website is worthwhile:

www.cordin.com

A very old fashioned Amercian company according to the Popular Science article that John Meyer gave the link to.

Bob.