Casio Exilim EX-F1 in the Wild: Slow-Motion Invades the Mainstream
Slow motion technology has been making huge leaps into affordability recently, and now that the Casio Exilim EX-F1 (check the review on luminous-landscape.com) is publicly available, youtube has suddenly been flooded with new high-FPS content, and I think we can safely say that slow-mo has hit the mainstream.
With Sony’s CMOS cameras we’ve had affordable slow-motion available for over a year, but the tape-based workflow was time-consuming and unintuitive, so required a bit too much effort for the general home user. However, the EX-F1 records to SD card, so you can post your captured files directly to youtube, and we’re seeing the results of that right now.
600FPS really seems to be the sweet spot for this camera, it’s getting into the realm of serious slow motion, but still has a reasonable amount of resolution available - 512×384 - absolutely perfect for Youtube or VJing.
The Luminous Landscape review says: “600 FPS and 1200 FPS are fun to play with, but frankly the image sizes are too small to do anything with other than to use in a high-school science fair project.” I couldn’t disagree more. Perhaps for a photographer, with no video production skills to speak of, they’re too small to do anything with, but I can’t imagine any visualist looking at that 1200FPS footage at 336×96 pixels and saying “nope, I can’t think of anything to do with that”.
This isn’t just useful for VJs though, looking through those youtube videos you’ll notice certain themes emerging: Archery, skateboarding, machinery, technology, athletics, violence, arty stuff… Accessible high speed video is going to change a lot of industries for a lot of people, and those who are best with video are going to be able to take advantage of it.
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vjwunderkind
I keep thinking this could really be a blast if tried with InstantHD. I haven’t really tried upscaling anything BELOW PAL resolution. But given that PAL blown up to HD looks quite good I dunno why 336×96 blown up to PAL shouldn’t look good. Has anyone got one of this babies? Send me a clip and I’ll try creating a higher rez film by upscaling it in InstantHD
May 30, 2008 @ 4:28 am
uli
read that review on Luminous Landscape aswell and even if they are quite old school with their measures, the image quality (not talking resolution) really isn’t that impressive. But the EX-F2 should come this year … hopefully!
May 31, 2008 @ 12:15 pm
Jaymis
I don’t think that the image quality issues will really cause many issues for the slow motion features, or rather, the reasonably low-resolution is a bigger issue :)
I agree that there’s going to be plenty of advances coming soon though.
May 31, 2008 @ 9:29 pm
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