degrees of slow motion

[Guest simon beckman]

so i'm shooting a bunch of people running across the street in normal speed. they're not racing just running like a marathon.

one particular runner jumps over an obstacle. in multiple angles i want to shoot him in slow motion. question is how fast do i have to run the camera to get running and more importantly a jump in a nice slow motion. 60fps would be convenient for the HMI's but i don't know if that's going to cut it. i could go 96fps. or more?

basically, i'm aware that i can always speed it up in post if it's too slow. on the other hand i don't want to burn through my mags like crazy and kill the crew pulling every light of the truck.

any pointers?

thanks in advance

 

simon beckman

[John Pytlak RIP]

It's a matter of how much you want to slow the action. If you want that one second run up and jump to have four seconds of screen time, you shoot 4 x 24 = 96fps. What's the pace of the scene? Are you looking for a subtle slowdown, or something really obvious?

Doc Edgerton and others slowed bullets to a crawl, and crash dummies are filmed at thousands of frames per second, so you certainly have the flexibility to manipulate time:

 

http://web.mit.edu/edgerton/

 

http://www.hiviz.com/

 

http://www.photosonics.com/Sales_HTLM/16mm.htm

 

http://www.photosonics.com/Sales_HTLM/35mm.htm