If you are reading this and thinking “hmmm…. Other cameras are available for other purposes, such as Photron’s FASTCAM BC2 HD, capable of 2,000 FPS at 1080p which is perfect for TV stations wishing to capture high-speed footage for sport. Just one second of footage at 1 million FPS would take a lengthy 11.5 hours to watch. Their Phantom v1610 records a whopping 18,100 FPS at 1280 x 720 (~750x slower than real-time) and can go up to 1 million FPS (41,500x slower than real-time) at 128 x 16. The Phantom Flex is not the only camera Vision Research produces in fact they have much faster cameras available if you want to sacrifice image quality. Keep in mind though that while 10 seconds sounds like not much, at 40x slower than real time, to watch the short clip it would take around six and a half minutes. Even with 32 GB of RAM on-board, the camera can only record up to 10.3 seconds worth of footage at 1,000 FPS, taking up 3.6 GB of space every second. To record at these sorts of speeds with a 1080p resolution the camera needs to utilize high-speed RAM to store the images. That is around 105 times slower than real motion if played back at the movie standard 24 frames per second. The Phantom Flex is used by many ad companies and film makers on their productions (such as the recent Sherlock Holmes sequel), and can record up to 2,570 frames per second at a Full HD 1080p resolution. On the more reasonable side of slow-motion cameras, the company Vision Research manufactures many different types, including the popular Phantom Flex camera. In fact, the supposedly “fastest” high-speed camera in the world can record at 200,000,000 (200 million) frames per second, making “even the fastest moving objects look like they are standing still.” Of course the image quality from this camera would not be very good, even though it demanded a $457,000 price tag.

However with a high-speed camera, the shutter must move much faster to achieve speeds of over 1,000 frames per second: a fairly common frame rate for slow-motion videos.Ĭameras don’t stop just at 1,000 frames per second though, they can continue upwards into millions and millions of frames per second at lowered resolutions. A normal everyday-Joe camera usually records at 30 or perhaps 60 frames per second (FPS), meaning that the shutter must activate 30-60 times every second. The actual technology behind high-speed photography and cameras is quite amazing.

Destruction also looks superb when slowed down, with shows such as Mythbusters frequently making use of the technology.Ĭoffee being blown out of a straw as captured by a high-speed camera Natural motion, such as frogs jumping, can look captivatingly beautiful when shot at thousands of frames per second, and can make nature shows amazing to view.

High-speed photography always amazes me at what can be produced when you simply slow down the world.

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