Ascent - Commemorating Shuttle

David Sekanina · February 3

I watch this maybe once a year - it's marvelous high speed footage (mostly 16mm) that documented various engineering aspects during a shuttle launch

Kamran Pakseresht · February 3

Very nice footage. After looking around a bit it seems like type of camera used was possibly a Redlake Locam? Looks like they topped out at around 500fps. I could imagine they had to modify them to handle the amount of film they would need to eat through for this footage.

David Sekanina · February 3

Most of them ran at 500 fps, that's 32 seconds of footage with a 400 ft roll. Considering the camera has to come up to speed first, I'd say maybe half of that, so 16 seconds for a 400ft roll.

Samuel Preston · February 3

this is incredible footage, just watched the whole thing. Really interesting technical details on the cameras they used too

Mark Dunn · February 3

8 hours ago, David Sekanina said:

Most of them ran at 500 fps, that's 32 seconds of footage with a 400 ft roll. Considering the camera has to come up to speed first, I'd say maybe half of that, so 16 seconds for a 400ft roll.

The Locam actually ramps up to full speed in a bit under a second, so only about 20ft. is wasted.

Edited February 3 by Mark Dunn

David Sekanina · February 5

Didn't know, thanks Marc

Nicholas Kovats · February 6

NASA utilized upwards of 50 x high speed 16mm, 35mm, 65mm and 70mm cameras surrounding the gantry. All pin-registered. Some cameras such as the Photo-Sonics Actionmaster 500 16mm HS camera had simple "metadata" exposed to the right of the frame, e.g. time in seconds, date, camera #, etc. They had upwards of 10x huge Photo-Sonics 70mm-10A high speed cameras. Most of the cameras were predominately Photo-Sonics. Some encased at the base with quartz portals.

I have two of the Photo-Sonics Actionmaster 500 16mm HS cameras with one utilized by NFL films. I had both converted to 3 or 4 pin XLR power connectors utilized with 8x cell LiPO 29.6V. It can peak at 11 to 15 amps on startup. One was converted to a PL mount. Uses 2-perf 16mm film stock with twin registration pin and pulldown. Exceedingly sharp frame line.

This was a quick registration test shot at 24fps with E100D, i.e. https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/612179757

This was a quick document of UK filmmaker Cherry Kino testing our initial "prototype" with the camera tied to a huge power source consisting of batteries and huge ceramic capacitors in a milk crate. Fun times. https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/222611616

My original intent was too utilize them predominately as rock steady MOS 24fps in conjunction with the internal digital crystal sync (PLL).

Amazing tech circa 1969 - 1971 regarding this PAM 500 16mm. Multiple Photo-Sonic 16mm and 35mm camera shutters can be synced which David Fincher utilized to great effect in The Fight Club (35mm). Nolan utilized Photo-Sonics 35mm cams at their maximum 360fps in Inception. Photo-Sonics even built a very rare 1000 fps 16mm camera with 8 rego pin/pulldown transport. The president of the company admitted to an fps war with either Locam or Redlake. These cameras are incredible "intermittent" transport systems not the faster but lower resolution prism transport systems which utilized frame blending.

Intermittent is king for maximum frame sharpness.