High Speed digital photography

[Chayse Irvin ASC, CSC]

PHANTOM HD -- http://www.visiblesolutions.com/index.cfm?...e=camera_HD_new

 

I'm interested in shooting this camera for some snowboard stunt footage up in whistlers halfpipe. Has anyone used this camera before. Looks pretty awesome to me.

[Elhanan Matos]

It is a neat camera, which has it's faults, just like they all do. I spent about two years working with High Speed HD cameras, and I've probably seen all the different models out there. It all depends on what you're planning to do with it. The reasons not to use it for your application are, the extremely low dynamic range, don't listen to what they say on the website, you're going to want to test the camera out yourself, I've found that these cameras all usually have around 4 maybe 5 stops of lattitude. So using this camera around snow might be very tough. Color on these cameras arent usually great either, take a look at the the Tiff on that page and look at the greens, I'm not a botanist, but I'm pretty sure those leaves shouldn't be that pale. Finally all the slow motion cameras have to be tethered right now, so don't expect to be able to be able to run around all over the place with this unless you can carry the laptop its connected to with it.

 

Now the reason to use it... it's cheap. It'll cost you probably around 1500 to 2000 dollars a day to rent this including the technician who comes with it... and thats it, you wont be going through thousands of dollars in a matter of seconds like you would have to with 35mm, assuming you are shooting at frame rates around 1,000 fps.

 

My suggestion would be to shoot 16mm for this. It would be a smaller camera system, no tether, you can shoot longer, and it looks better! and it would probably cost just as much if not a little bit more.