Sports slo-mo with Sony HDR-UX5 or equivalent

flippin wrote on 9/18/2007, 4:05 PM
Is this any good?

I've been interested for awhile in doing better than the typical 30 fps frame rate but professional high-speed video costs a small fortune.

Now Sony has this line of vidcams that are advertised to be able to take up to 3 seconds of video at 240 fps (i.e., 3x their 'normal' frame rate of 60 fps, which must certainly be 60i, right?) with a shutter speed of down to 1/500.

If anyone here is familiar with these vidcams (Sony list this feature as "Smooth Slow Recording" or something like that) I would like to know how the quality is for fast sports motions, i.e., golf or baseball bat swing, parts of a pitcher's motion, etc.

I presume this vidcam cannot shoot in progressive mode but that would actually be my preference--if I had my way I'd take 120 fps in progressive mode over 240 fps of interlaced video for slo-mo work, unless someone here has more experience and can set me straight on this issue.

Any information, especially from people who have done slo-mo work with this type of vidcam, would be very much appreciated.

Any suggestions about alternative vidcams that can shoot higher frame rates would also be welcome.

Best regards,

Lee

Comments

Spot|DSE wrote on 9/18/2007, 4:20 PM
Smooth slo-recording is done at the expense of resolution. In HD modes, you can get half-SD resolution at the longest record time of 12 seconds. It's not pretty, but it *is* very smooth. It's also interlaced.
No one does "cheap" over/undercrank like Panasonic's cams if you don't mind spending 7-8K. XDCAM does a terrific overcrank too.
good n' cheap don't mix when you're trying to capture overcranked footage.
flippin wrote on 9/18/2007, 5:18 PM
re: "...good n' cheap don't mix when you're trying to capture overcranked footage. "

-----Hah! Good one, Spot. And, yes, I do mind spending $7 - 8 K. Or. more to the point, my family would probably object.... I am a private hobbiest who simply makes a decent enough living working at his day job to support modest experiments, not "1/2 of a new car" level experiments.

There is a company called Fastec, located in San Diego, who is going to be rolling out a "Fastec Sports Cam" for just under $5K but that is still too rich for my limited means.... at $2 - 3K for a really decent vidcam that can record at 250 fps progressive I'd probably take the plunge and risk the family's ire.
farss wrote on 9/18/2007, 10:08 PM
A camera that can shoot 250fps isn't that much of a challenge these days, recording that much data fast enough is what costs the money.

One trick if your camera lets you control it is to shoot with a faster shutter speed. If you plan to slomo to 50% then halve your shutter speed e.g. say your normal shutter speed is 1/60, then for 50% make it 1/120th (1/100 is close enough). At 30% slomo shutter speed would be 1/180th, 1/200 is close enough.

Bob.
flippin wrote on 9/19/2007, 9:15 AM
Thanks, farss--Actually I do typically shoot with very low shutter speeds. I've got an old but reliable Panasonic DVX100A that gets down to 1/1000.

Using the 24p mode, the 1/1000 shutter gives extremely sharp detail for the fastest sports motions--e.g., it can freeze a pitched baseball at the point of contact with a swung bat. But, of course, the problem is that the frame rate is slow, so anything slo-mo'ed lower than about 25 - 30 % of normal doesn't look smooth and continuous.

Also, because a pitcher's arm may be traveling at ~90 mph near release of a ball, there is quite a bit of uncertainty as to exactly which part of the motion those individual sharp frames will capture. At 24p with 1/1000 shutter, I can get the ball just leaving the fingertips of a pitcher's hand perhaps 1 out of 4 or 5 times. All of the other times the ball is either 1 or 2 feet out of the hand, or 1 or 2 feet from being released.

A 10x higher frame rate would obviously improve my chances of seeing every desired detail in each clip, and it would of course improve the slo-mo quality at very slow Vegas velocities.

I looked into the XDCAM and Panasonic's stuff as per Spot's kind suggestion, but their var. frame rates only go to 60p. That would be 2 1/2 times better than what I'm getting now but, reversing the old saying, that seems like a lot of buck for the bang....