Need Camera for high speed events barely visible to eye. Slow motion playback

[Tom Weber]

Hey Guys,

New to the boards.. stumbled across while looking for imformation on filming high speed events, for slow motion in post editing.

Our goal is this. We need a camera that will allow us to film little chips of metal flying off of another piece of metal the size of a drill bit or pencil in a grinding type process. Our hopes are to be able to slow down the video and see these chips of metal flaking off, which are barely visible to the naked eye in realtime.

Price of the camera is of consideration, unfortunately.

I'm just jumping into the area, and quite frankly am just beginning my research so any and all information as far as concepts would be appreciated.

[Boyd Ostroff]

Welcome to DVinfo Tom! I suspect you'll need to buy/rent a specialized high speed camera for this. Try Googling "high speed video camera" and you'll get lots of results, such as these:

http://www.photron.com/
http://www.visiblesolutions.com/phantomv6.html
http://www.nacinc.com/highspeedcameras.html
http://www.olympusindustrial.com/ind...185/parentid/1

etc...

[Tom Weber]

Thanks for the help!

We had a gentlemen come in from a local business to demonstrate the Troubleshooter camera (http://www.techimaging.com/products-Bat-tro-HR.html) and we did some sample filming at 250fps and 500fps. Our lighting conditions were not very good, and the lens that he had brought for the test wasn't the right one so our shot was not very tight on what we were trying to film.

The video we captured was decent.. If we had the right lens and more lighting it would have been alot better, and this was at 250fps. The gentle stated that with the better lighting, we could increase the frame rate, which would allow better focus on the metal chips flying off. What we're shooting for, is to be able to read a name written on one of these chips (if it was written on there for example)

Here is the test video we did:
http://www.tmweber.com/drilltest.avi
file is 24mb.


This camera will cost about $15k. Very expensive. If this is the type of camera we must use, then we'll get it.

Would this camera work?
Canon Gl2
http://consumer.usa.canon.com/ir/con...5&modelid=7512


I think I dont understand completely terminology. This camera has a 1/15,000 frame rate. Could someone explain this relative to what I am trying to film? Would this camera work ?

Thanks for the help guys!

[Pete Bauer]

Tom, the 1/15,000th is shutter speed, not frame rate.

The highest progressive frame rate in cameras under $10k that I'm aware of is 60fps progressive from the Panasonic HVX200 at 720p. I've also gotten pretty nice 1/5 speed slow motion by time stretching the 1080i60 from a Canon XL H1 to 24fps in PPro and After Effects. Otherwise, to really do what you want, I agree with Boyd that you're probably looking at an expensive specialty camera; I suspect you'd not find the result from any miniDV camera to be satisfactory.

[Ash Greyson]

$15K is about the cheapest you will get off... you need a highly specialized camera. Do you need to own this or can you just rent it? There is no regular video camera that will come close to your needs. The highest frame rate on even the middle-end $50k cameras is 60fps.



ash =o)

[Tom Hardwick]

I wonder if it's worth considering 16 mm film and having the footage digitised. 1000 fps and even 2000 fps with non-internmittent prism spinning is available.

tom.

[Rob Wilson]

Tom,

Trying to get "the" chip that has something written on it will be a huge challange. Have you thought about using the footage you listed above and putting the name on a chip as it flys off and away in post? I would think that any text you put on the source material would distort as the chip was formed by the cutter (the chips seem to curl).

[Steve House]

Try a Google for "Fastax" cameras. These are high speed, rotating prism film cameras that can run at incredible frame rate. Years ago when I was in college we used them to amuse ourselves with ultra slow motion films of blasting caps exploding, bullets puncturing balloons, etc. The school had a bunch of them for military ordnance and warhead detonation studies and also lightning photography. It's amazing to see a blasting cap slowly start to bulge out and then fracture or the sides of a warhead bulge out and turn into a cloud of smoke with a pressure wave slowly expanding out from it, then chunks of shrapnel flying out of the smoke and passing the pressure wave in the air. When triggered they took moments s to run up to speed, kind of sounded like a jet engine starting up, and then when you engaged the film feed there be a "fweeeeeeeeeeeeeeep" and in just a few seconds a thousand foot magazine would be exposed.

[Boyd Ostroff]

Originally Posted by Steve House

Try a Google for "Fastax" cameras.

My Dad used to be the chief design engineer for pyrotechnic systems McDonald Douglas when I was a kid. He had all kinds of cool Fastax footage of things like explosive bolts firing on the Mercury and Gemini spacecrafts.

Those things go through a LOT of film though :-)

[Steve House]

Originally Posted by Boyd Ostroff

My Dad used to be the chief design engineer for pyrotechnic systems McDonald Douglas when I was a kid. He had all kinds of cool Fastax footage of things like explosive bolts firing on the Mercury and Gemini spacecrafts.

Those things go through a LOT of film though :-)

I encountered them back in the early 60's on my work-study program job in college. At the time we were doing a lot of field testing of explosives, artillery, and warhead systems for the Navy and Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, like some of the ground test firings of Sidewinder, Talos, and Tartan warheads. Produced some very intersting footage! Great place to go to school if you had a fascination with things that made loud noises. I understand the campus's facilities are still home to a lot of R&D programs on "energetic materials" for DOD, DOE, and law enforcement.