How Much Does A High Speed Camera Cost

Replay: Tedious motion is getting better in affordable cameras, but it still can't match the heady heights of a Vision Enquiry Phantom Flex 4K. Volition information technology always happen? Here's a few reasons why we're not there yet.

At that place are a lot of reasons people don't use lower-cease cameras to shoot large movies, and motion-picture show quality is not almost of those reasons. Large-upkeep mainstream movies have been shot on cameras much, much less capable, in film terms, than the original Blackmagic Pocket Movie theatre Camera. It's not worth rehashing all those reasons hither – they're well enough known and there'south politics afoot – but in the end it's a natural result of what we might call "democratisation." It'south at least theoretically possible to shoot a movie on a second-hand camera that costs a twenty-four hours or two'due south wages and bold y'all set it upwards appropriately, pointed information technology at something interesting and didn't manage to lose the matter down the back of the sofa, nobody would exist whatsoever the wiser.

Boring move is still very expensive

Merely in that location is a last bastion of democratisation. Information technology still costs as much as a very nice car – even a couple of very nice cars – to shoot 4K at a m frames a 2nd.

There are cellphones that will practice 720p at 960 frames for short periods. The results don't exactly compete with a Phantom, though information technology seems ungenerous to complain too much about a 960-frame-per-2d burst camera that happens too to exist a advice device, video on demand last and a link to the single greatest information resource that has ever existed... that fits in your back pocket and costs a day'due south wages. At the other end of the scale, even quite midrange digital cameras are starting to push button up into the low hundreds of frames a second. A Blackmagic Ursa Mini 12K volition shoot 4K on a Super 16mm effective sensor at 240fps. Fifty-fifty now information technology seems relevant to mention the increasingly venerable, but, adored, Sony FS700 which brought 240fps full Hd on a Super 35mm sensor to very midrange users as early as 2012.

The business finish of a Phantom Flex 4K. Prototype: Vision Enquiry.

But there isn't anything in that sort of toll range that'll do a thousand frames while maintaining 4K resolution. If you're happy with HD, a Vision Research Phantom Miro 320S will do 1500 frames for peradventure $25,000. If you want all the resolution, a Phantom Flex 4K achieves 938 frames at 4096 past 2304. The price of all these cameras depends on the amount of storage, but numbers in the $100,000 to $170,000 range are public. Various cameras support various recording formats, but to get an idea, a notional photographic camera shooting a 14 bit raw 4096 past 2160 frame from a Bayer camera captures about 15 megabytes of data per frame.

What it takes to become at 1000fps

At normal frame rates, that's easily feasible; even if we desire 60 frames, it's under a gigabyte a 2d and off-the-shelf wink devices will handle information technology twice over, and and then some. What if we want to go faster, though? At 1000fps, things are a little unlike. That's virtually 15 gigabytes a second, and that's not something that off the shelf storage devices will easily handle. In terms of It's perhaps something that six off the shelf storage devices would barely achieve, assuming the average NVMe device will manage near 2.5GB a 2nd and we had some mode of accumulation them all together.

That's but a quick way of putting into perspective simply how difficult high speed cameras are. We haven't even touched on the much more hard bug of designing a sensor that'll work at that speed. Information technology's not so easy to eddy that down to a set of numbers. Only transporting the tiny, delicate signals generated by each photosite across the substrate of the sensor is difficult to exercise even at conventional rates; inquire for something that goes 40 times faster and things get really difficult.

The Chronos 2.i-Hard disk goes some way to democratising boring motion. Image: Kron Technologies.

Anyone daft enough to try to predict the future in engineering science like this is taking a big risk, only here goes. Probably we can expect conventional cameras to abound in capability as they have done, and the amount of work that's being poured into cellphones has led to some actually unexpected things. Other parts of filmmaking have seen massive disruption from very unexpected directions; we tin at present do helicopter shots that would have cost four figures an hour with systems that cost less than that to buy.

For the fourth dimension being, there's however at least one matter we can't do inexpensive. Notwithstanding, mentum upwardly; it'south cheaper – much, much, much cheaper – than high speed film ever was.

As this commodity came in, we were made aware of a new evolution by Nikon that could turn everything on its head. Stay tuned for our coverage.

Tags: Technology Production