Inside tech fiends the world over, there is a deep-seated desire to film lightning strikes, bullets penetrating glass and objects dropped into water, if only to see the fantastic, chaotic patterns played back in slow motion. (Peep an example after the break.) Thing is, most cameras fast enough to catch such phenomena do so with a tradeoff -- like the
Phantom V12, which had a tiny 256 x 8 picture at its impressive 1,000,000fps. But now,
Vision Research claims they have a camera that does it all: the Phantom Flex, which captures 1080p images at up to 2,800fps -- with 1000 ISO sensitivity -- and can shoot higher (2560 x 1600 at 1,560fps), faster (640 x 480 at 13,000fps) or even slower (down to 5fps) for regular filming. Since the high speed modes fill the onboard 16 or 32GB of memory in the blink of an eye, the sexy black number supports hot-swappable SSD modules for storage, and can even be synced in pairs to film
blue alien Pocahontas reenactments in stereoscopic 3D. Hit the source link for a mouthwatering spec sheet, and don't ask how much it costs. You really don't want to know.
Note: The below video was not captured with a Phantom Flex, it is simply representative of what high-speed cameras can do.
posted April 19th 2010 5:19AM
Great video!
@mattpez The video is awesome! 2800 frags per second.
@mattpez
how come it wasn't uploaded in 1080p?
I want one for GUI responsiveness benchmarking!
32GB?!?! Even a 2TB HDD will last less than a minute in full HD @ 2800FPS. Good luck future movie makers trying to somehow record an hour of footage with this!
@mnhthebest 1080p at 24 fps is 9gb per minute uncompressed (according to a google search..)
so if we make that 2800 fps that comes to... 1050gb per minute..
that can't be right that google result was probably wrong
@mnhthebest
How long do your 2,800fps movies usually last?
@mnhthebest no one will shoot full movie at 2800fps otherwise 1.5 hour footage played at 30fps will take 140 hour to play.
@Broderbund When you do highspeed photography you only record a couple to a few seconds at that framerate. That is more than enough internal cache for most applications. If it's not you can just hook it up to an external data recorder for more capacity via high speed data links.
@mnhthebest This is Vision Research.... Not RED...
@mnhthebest
I'm assuming thats why there is an Ethernet port on the device for NAS storage.
@Broderbund
if that being the case how does all that movie fit on a blu-ray disk @ 25 GB?
@DeFlanko Well, the ethernet port is to offload data from the CineMags onto computers(usually laptops). Its slow but get the job done.
When the final cut is done, the video would be exported and compressed into a h.264 video file thats small enough to put onto a blu ray.
@DeFlanko blu-ray is 50-75GB, and to top that the 1080p is encoded and compressed using (I'm guessing) H.264 which is a sub-codec (once again without googling cause I'm too lazy) of MPEG-4 or is somehow related to MPEG-4. as a result 1080p compressed prolly takes up 1/4th or less of the space as it does uncompressed.
Basic math:
1080 is
1920x1080 pixels = 2 073 600 pixels
Assuming this camera captures 8 bit per color without mosaicing (very doubtull)
This would be
2 073 600 px * 3 color channel * (1 byte / (colorChannel * px))
= 6 220 800 Byte
~= 6 mb per frame
6 mb/frame * 2800 frames/sec = 16,5 GB / sec
6 mb/frame * 25 frames/sec = 150 MB / sec
16,5 GB / sec * 60 sec / min ~= 1 TB
150 MB / sec * 60 sec / min ~= 9 GB
Blurays are either encoded with MPEG2 or h264, more specifically most are encoded with h264 High Profile, which among other things reduces the resolution of the color channels, this reduces the size to 0.5, other factors again reduce the size to at most 40 Mbit/s or about 1/30th of the size of the original data stream.
How much does it cost?
How much does it cost?
@Beatty Not announced yet. But it sits between the Phantom Gold and 65. The Phantom 65 is $144,000, the v640 is $117,000, the Gold is $117,500, the V12.1 is $105,000 and V210 is $68,000.
@Beatty O-U-C-H !
I've tried searching for it and am unable to find the price. I assume it would only cost me an arm. Acceptable, as I can still take pictures with the other functioning arm anyway.
@Severian126 I dunno. This baby might cost you a soul.
@Severian126 Just an arm? By the time your camera is delivered, your new nickname will be "Torso-boy"!
@Severian126
you got a bionic arm or something? made from solid gold and encrusted with diamonds? maybe you have an arm from iron man?
Yeah I actually DO want to know how much it costs. This thing is sick.
To those above i honestly doubt this camera was made to shoot an entire 60 minute movie so even at 1050gb a minute of usage or whatever was claimed above. That usage is most likely acceptable for the people who would actually use this stuff, such as scientist.
Well I think that this puppy would cost around 120-150k usd. It's a professional cinematographers camera. Definately not for everyone to own. Apparantly per 1000 frames of 1080p video. It takes 3.6gb. Monstrous files but they are after all full HD slow motion video. Btw lenses cost 10k and above. Cheers!
Judging by other Phantom cams this probably costs near to $100,000.
At long last, we can create the Baywatch movie.
@Dante of the Inferno
Or girls on trampolines.
Here's a small gif
[URL=http://img231.imageshack.us/i/visionresearchsphantomf.gif/][IMG]http://img231.imageshack.us/img231/3694/visionresearchsphantomf.gif[/IMG][/URL]
@slorkluk fail?
Holy crap.
def $120,000-$150,000 mark
I'll have you know that at Los Alamos Lab they use cameras that run at over a trillion frames per second. That is it takes a shot every few hundred femtoseconds.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streak_camera
And here are some examples of pics taken with a camera that runs at over 10 billion frames per second (1995 technology btw .. todays are much faster):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:1995_Nova_Laser_Implosion_of_DT_hohlraum_target.jpg
@vanillaice if i eventually buy this, i might need your service sir.
If only they'd filmed Basic Instinct with one of these.
Cool camera, it's a shame that is is controlled with some god-awful Windows NT based application. And if you've ever called Vision Research with a problem or question (which none of you have), you'll see they've traded social skills for technological prowess.
The Phantom HD Gold is $117k, so this one will push $150k I'm sure.
The hot swappable SSDs go for $9000 and up.
256 x 8 @ 1,000,000fps
dont you think 8 pixels is a bit too inadequate?
This is obviously for pros, scientific research uses even better cameras as the other posts have pointed out.
By the time this capability hits the consumer (10yrs?) we might have all killed each other in a senseless war.
Our biggest threat to seeing any of this technology we see on engadget is ourselves.
hit em with dat flex
This is totally for Mythbusters! They only do a few seconds at at time, in the past they have used 1000fps, would be sweet if they got one of these!
Forget slow-motion..... 16:9 and 2,800 fps, really gives the footage that cinematic quality.
Super freaking cool, but which editing software is currently able to handle all of those resolution and frame rate variations? Or is this be something akin to IMAX in terms pf proprietary workflow? Very interesting...
@Marc B Avid and Final Cut can both handle this, as well as all the other high end systems. You can transcode the data from the Phantom pretty easy, just takes forever.