Shooting Ultra Slow Motion

P

Pixelbeast

New member
Hi all,

I'm interested in ultra slow motion photography, (specifically with falling rain) but don't have any real experience shooting anything faster than 150fps in HD video.

Any suggestions on camera rentals, or post-production tricks that might push the envelope? Most of the clips I'm looking at for reference are closer to the 1000fps mark.

Here's a piece of stock footage from Art Beats that's similar to what I'm interested in achieving:
http://www.artbeats.com/clips/18733/28510

If you have any experience shooting this kind of footage I'd love to hear from you! Thanks in advance for your advice!

-PB
 
hi PB well if you look carefully at the shot you will notice they didnt shot on any camera to capture that kind of slow motion you will need a high speed camera that can capture upto 1000 frames per second so that when you slow down the footage on post you will get results similar to that and is awesome a good camera that can do that is called Phantom HD it cost a fortune but the results are AMAZING the camera can be adjusted from 1fps to 1000fps search on youtube for High speed video camera or phantom HD then you will know what am talking about good luck
 
That's one helluva run-on sentence, nicholas. Nice work!


The Phantom is a good option. I've only had a few experiences with it, but the results are very impressive. you can shoot 1052 (or maybe it was 1054) frames per second at 1920x1080. If you decrease the resolution you can up the frame rate.

I don't have any post experience with it. I believe you can use it tethered to a computer or with the Cinemags (a 500+ gigabyte swappable solid state magazine). The Cinemag can hold 190,000 frames...which will give you anywhere from 3 minutes to hundreds of hours of footage depending on your framerate :)

Call up your local Panavision to pick one up.
 
As you may know AbelCineTech is the Phantom dealer and we have been developing it for a long time now. We rent the cameras and sell them to various rental houses including Panavision. The Phantom HD can shoot 1052 FPS at 1920x1080 and higher at lower resolutions as Trudd said. We are also renting the Phantom V12.1 now which can shoot 6933FPS at 1280x720 which is just damn fast.

Check out a little video on our blog - http://blog.abelcine.com/2009/03/25/phantom-v121-footage/

The Phantom is a great camera but does require a tech so if you'd like to rent it we can help you find someone to work the job as well.
 
Ethan:

Do you recall what kind of lighting you guys had for those shots? The fastest I have shot is 300 fps, would be interested to know what kinds of instruments and lighting levels you had to achieve to film these?

Thanks,

Dan
 
The Phantom is great for HD stuff, full frame PL mount, its a high speed digital cinema camera really.

Photron have just come up with a Phantom competitor, which shoots 2k at 1000fps. Its not full s35 frame though. I think they are probably cheaper to rent if you can find anyone that has one. Pirate in the UK has one. P+S also has their weisscam which does HD.

If it HAS to be HD your pretty much stuck with those.

You can do ultra slowmo with industrial cameras, like the Olympus iSpeed, Photron Fastcam PCI cameras or the new Phantom Miro.

If you want a really cheap way out, the Casio EX-F1 will shoot up to 1200 FPS, and its about £500, but the frame res at 1200 FPS is about 200x100px or something stupid, so its not really an option.

Unfortunatly due to the sheer ammount of data that is being transfurred, the processing and storage needed to do HD highspeed imaging costs a fortune, and obviously this stuff is produced one by one, very low volumes so the price is high. The results are worth it though.
 
Do you guys get Time Warp over in the U.K. on Discovery? Anyone who is a high speed fan should be in 22 minutes of heaven per week. It is pretty repetitive, but pretty cool to watch. I will be suprised if they can milk more than one full season out of it though. Watching stuff blow up, vibrate and warp with high speed is really fun but after a while, it all looks the same kind of.

Or maybe more creative types and fewer camera geek/engineer types need to be able to shoot with them?

Dan
 
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