I went to a SMPTE post NAB thing the other night… it was a break down of technical innovation from the conference last month… and I ran into Phiroze Dalal from Vision Research. I had seen these guys when I was talking at the Codex booth to the development team and Vision Research was the next booth over. What caught my eye was their 1000fps footage HD.

We are going to film some pieces for fxphd on their Phantom HD 1000fps – 1920 x1080 14bit. The thing that makes this so amamingly useful is tat even at those frame rates the images are clean and very low noise. Vision Research also make a 4K 125fps frame camera – the Phantom 65, so named since the sensor is the same size as 65mm. These guys have been doing high speed military and commerical stuff for ages – and now they are moving into our industry. Nice guys and I look forward to getting our Post-grads some really cool footage.

Of course there were a lot of interesting cameras at NAB… the RED, Viper, Aaton Penelope, Dalsa, Silicon Imaging, Sony F23, new XDCAM 4:2:2, it remains to be seen how many survive the next few years. Vision Research has a long track record outside our industry and Phiroze was saying 1000fps is at the SLOW end of their cameras,… they film flashes cameras going off to clock the flash curves, or guns firing – he himself used to be in the car division and smash cars with 17 high speed cameras attached – now thats a cool job !

Anyway the high speed shoot will be done soon – we’ll keep you informed.

BTW this weekend we shoot stunts – in Sydney on Sunday – should be fun. But man if organising a shoot is not a way to go quickly insane. Still having fought to get our sound stage clear of problems that would have delayed us,.. we seem all set… I will blog it on Monday.