The Official High-Speed Camera Thread

[jackssmirkingrevenge]

Welcome to the club, I guarantee you'll be filming pretty much everything in HS for the first couple of days

[ramses]

Welcome to the club, I guarantee you'll be filming pretty much everything in HS for the first couple of days

It wears off eventually.

[MrCrowley]

That's true, though the HD makes it worth the purchase. For me, the HD almost would make it worth while if it didn't even have HS.

[Ragnarok]

I guarantee you'll be filming pretty much everything in HS for the first couple of days

I think I may spend quite a bit of time filming the dog - I KNEW he had a use.
His top speed may not be that high (to the extent I can just about catch him at full sprint, although worryingly, he seems to be getting faster and still not entirely reliable on his recall), but that speed appears entirely unaffected by any obstacles in his way or cornering.

But I think what I'll probably start by doing is waiting for three tedious hours while the battery charges... I guess I can use that time to read the manual (although, this being the digital age, I've already downloaded the PDF version from the Casio website).

It wears off eventually.

That's part of what I was thinking when I went for the FH100. I've wanted one of these things for sometime, but I wanted to be buying a camera for more than just the video functions.

That way I knew that even if I found the HS video wasn't worth as much as I thought it was, then I knew I still had a camera that was a hefty upgrade over my last one.

That's true, though the HD makes it worth the purchase.

That reminds me, I have to see if I can borrow another HD camera again.
I'd like to try and film my entry for the "best shot" competition in both HS and HD - it obviously can't be done with only the one camera.

...well, unless you're D_Hall and happen to be able to shoot full HD at several thousand frames per second.

[jackssmirkingrevenge]

It wears off eventually

.. but when you're working on rapid cycling mechanisms and trying to figure out what's going on you realise it can be a valuable design tool and not just an expensive novelty

[MrCrowley]

Same with if you're trying to figure out if your piston is bouncing or not in your piston hybrid

[Ragnarok]

Well, it's arrived early this morning and the battery is charging...

(Battery #1 of 3, anyway. I bought two spares - although there was no way I was paying the premium for the official Casio branded ones.)

you realise it can be a valuable design tool and not just an expensive novelty

That's what I'm looking at for the higher frame rates - it's not high enough quality to make a beautiful video where you can see targets disintegrate into a cloud of fragments, but for analysis, it's still going to have a lot of uses.
(Being the kind of person who's interested in pursuing accuracy, barrel resonances are up there on my list of things to film.)

From what I can tell of other people's videos, it looks like quality starts to go downhill pretty fast in the 420 and 1000 fps modes, so I'm expecting to use those more for analysis and use the 120 and 240 fps modes for pretty exploding things.

Although I don't know yet. All I've really seen is the video from the FC100, so perhaps the FH100's backlit sensor will make the faster frame rates a bit less noisy and more usable. We'll find out.

[qwerty]

Good choice Rag, my friend has an FH100 and we were playing around with it in my gym. He was filming me doing backflips and i found that the best quality to speed ratio was definatly 240fps. 120 seemed abit to "normal" for my liking and anything higher than 240 was just too pixelated. 240fps is pretty good quality and the slow-motion is also slow enough to observe the details of the clip.

[Ragnarok]

To appease you all, one of my test videos - one of the shorter and more interesting ones at least.

[youtube][/youtube]
(I've embedded it for the sake of it, but for some reason, Premiere Elements decided to export as widescreen, so it gets compressed into 4:3 in the embed box. If you want to get a better version, I recommend watching it on the Youtube page instead.)

EDIT: Was listed as "Private" for some reason. Fixed.

The quality isn't perfect, as the indoor lighting I can muster isn't really enough, but it seems to improve dramatically as light levels go up.

I did do some tests with my Air Arms half to look at the spring recoil, half to try synchronising a simultaneous sound recording, but they weren't quite as interesting as I thought they would be.

[Gun Freak]

DUDE that dog trick was a win... and your dog is so cute
I expect great things from you and your camera. I want one for x-mas.

[Insomniac]

Not bad at all... You'll find that sunlight gives, by far, the best result. Really bright filiament lamps come in second out of the light sources I've tried so far, as they are both bright enough for decent quality, and don't flicker too much... the heated filiament seems to dampen out the 50hz pulse somewhat.

If your bathroom has those big powerful heat globes, you should try filming under them... the 4 375 watt globes, combined with the reflective white surfaces, is the reason that I do so much of my indoor filming in the bathroom. Fluroescent lights are of course terrible. Though they do look kinda cool at 1000fps

[Technician1002]

Some CF bulbs have a DC supply and high frequency inverter in them and have no flicker in the HS camera range. Test them. Your results may vary. The 150 watt replacenments are plenty bright in a reflector flood housing.

Somewhere on You tube is a HS video of a dozen or so CF lamps starting up. There is flicker as they start, but that soon ends.

[Ragnarok]

DUDE that dog trick was a win...

I'll be honest - it wasn't the only take. He's still learning that one and sometimes misses.

and your dog is so cute

We get that one so much I'm surprised anyone owns anything other than red cocker spaniels.

Not bad at all... You'll find that sunlight gives, by far, the best result.

I know - even the videos I filmed outside in fairly dreary weather came out better than some of the interior ones.

Problem is, it's an English autumn, so good weather and strong sunlight is rather hard to come by at the moment.

If your bathroom has those big powerful heat globes, you should try filming under them...

Unfortunately not. The kitchen is the best indoor lighting I've got, with something like 500 watts halogen lighting, as well as a few assorted fluorescent lights.

Because of various legislation, it's no longer possible to get 100 watt filament bulbs in the UK (stupid as that is), so most of our lights have had to be replaced with 20 Watt energy saving replacements, which although improving, still look pretty funny under high speed.

[Insomniac]

Problem is, it's an English autumn, so good weather and strong sunlight is rather hard to come by at the moment.

Ah... It would seem that the Australian summer is spoiling me .

[MrCrowley]

I have noticed HD seems kind of crap when you're filming a wide shot with nothing close to the camera. It's brilliant for when the subject is close to the camera but seems to struggle when you've got too much background. It's a shame there's no zoom when filming HD on the FC100 (I think you can zoom on the FH100 when filming HD though) because then you can get much better focus on a particular subject while blurring the background.