flying in
verb \ˈflī – iŋ ˈin\ – common call on a film set indicating that a specific tool or piece of equipment is being brought on set | acknowledgement of a request to “fly in ____”
A true Chewer is marked by a curiosity into every aspect of filmmaking, from theory to craft. To put a little more spotlight on the latter, I bring you Flying In – a wide lensed look at the various developments and goings on in the film tech world. Some of the things covered will be on the DIY, indie filmmaking level and others will be at the cutting edge, but it will all be interesting.
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I’ll go ahead and let you know that the “holy shit” factor of this story diminshes quickly as you hear more details, but know that it is still really, really cool.
Phantom is a company well known for manufacturing high-speed cameras that can record digital film at extremely high frame rates used for studying fast events and to empower gimmicky slow-motion shows like Time Warp. They’ve upped their game with their latest announcement, for the Phantom v1610 with the eye-catching boast of a one million frames per second mode. There’s a big caveat though, as employing that mode will reduce your resolution to a useless-except-in-very-specific-circumstances 128 x 16 or…
You can't fit a dude getting punched in the face (or even windmilling his tiny penis) in this frame. This frame is only fit for science.
…obviously you’re not going to see any amazing Mythbusters footage shot at that speed, which would frankly be worthless anyway as it would take something like 12 hours to watch a single second of footage anyway. However! The camera is capable of an impressive 16,000 fps at HD resolution, and at SD resolution you can bust out a remarkable 43,400 fps. This will definitely be bringing some cool footage to us soon, as combustion events and other ultra-fast occurrences will be slowed down more than ever before, and at resolutions worth watching.
This camera, like all of the Phantom models, will fetch a cardiac-arrest-inducing amount of money, so don’t expect to grab one of these casually. The best we can hope for is that the privileged few that get to shoot with this will point it at cool things.
I want to hear your ideas for cool shit to be shot at 1m fps… twitter, comments, boards.