OT: High speed cameras.

farss wrote on 11/22/2004, 12:38 AM
Might need to shoot some fast moving plant early next year and we need to slo mo it so the action can be clearly seen. The whole cycle probably only takes a few seconds so I'm looking for pretty dramatic slo mo. Varicam will I think give me 90 fps and I guess I can squeeze another 50% out of Vegas so that may do.
Questions are:
1) How to get Varicam footage into Vegas? Bear in mind clips will only be a few seconds long so bringing in a still sequence is feasible.
2) Anyone know of anything that goes faster than Varicam? I know there's film cameras that'll do it but I can probably afford a Varicam for a day but a high speed film camera is a bit out of the budget.

I do have another rather bizarre idea of how to do this. Given that the thing being filmed repeats a cycle every few seconds I could just take a LOT of stills with faster shutter / flash. Then assemble the frames to build a complete cycle, with luck I should be able to emulate 1000 fps. For those who think I'm nuts, this is the same as what happens when you use a strobe light to 'slow down' a piece of spinning machinery.

Bob.

Comments

ScottW wrote on 11/22/2004, 5:46 AM
Don't know if this helps, but these puppies are designed for capture of this sort:

http://www.visiblesolutions.com/
farss wrote on 11/22/2004, 1:56 PM
I've emailed them to see what it'll take for a unit that'll hold several minutes of footage. Their demos are pretty impressive. Their off the shelf cameras only record to internal RAM and need a trigger.
With an external storage device though you can record a lot more video. A pretty fierce data rate to handle but should be doable these day. I've seen someone else's unit that used SCSI disks but SATA should be able to keep up and much easier to connect as a portable unit.

Bob.