High speed video is rapidly getting more accessible. In late 2006 a camera which could do 500FPS would set you back US$8800 (or $350/day rental). Now, the newest addition to the high-speed-cameras-for-normal-people - the Casio EX-F1 is shooting at up to 1200FPS, for $1000.

Of course, it’s a still camera as well, and it records 1080i and 720p footage, but I didn’t put “slow motion” up there in the title of this post to talk about boring old 30FPS.

The EX-F1 encodes straight to H264, so none of the shoot-wait-shoot behavior of my Sony tape-based HVR-V1P, and it doesn’t seem to have the same 3/6/12 second real-time limit. Like the Sony, slow-motion causes a loss of frame size: 300FPS gives you a reasonable 512×384 (considerably better than the effective resolution I tested from the HVR-V1P), 600FPS drops you to a youtube-esq 432×192, and 1200FPS gives you 336×96.

As seen in the above video, a little creative framing and editing will let you work with this limitation, but it looks like we still have a while to wait before we can mix full-frame slow motion video in to our projects. 512×384 is definitely useable though, and can give some beautiful results:

More Videos and Information:
Spud Gun destroying Eggs on Gizmodo.
Tomato Violence on Gizmodo.
Casio EX-F1 on Youtube.
Full Review on Gizmodo.

(not surprisingly, via Gizmodo Video)

After my last slow motion tests with my Sony HVR-V1P, CDMo reader FANF gave me some quick tips on how to run a resolution test.

Now here is a little protocol for definition testing: Get his first: http://www.graphics.cornell.edu/~westin/misc/ISO_12233-reschart.pdf
Print it 350 dpi min, 600 recommended.

Place it in a well lit spot, in the sun for example, fixed to the wall. Use a spirit level. Place your camera with the optical axis perpendicular to the plane of the testchart (measure hight, use spirit level).
You should not see the white triangles on the underscanned image. No white triangle pointing into the image, the black triangles should ideally be pointing to the perfect edge of the screen.

To test the resolution/definition on the full breadth of the lens, do a test at wide angle, mid, and full tele, placing camera/testchart at the right distance for the scale to be right.
It would be equally important to test each focal at iris values 1.6, 2.8, 4, 5.6, 8, 11 to have a good idea of how definition rises and falls when you stop down.
To do this, use the “aperture prioriy” or “Av” program mode on your camera for correct exposure.

The definition of your camera, horizontal & vertical being distinct, is read by following the lines along the higher numbers ; the number where you cannot distinguish them from one another is your definition, in n x 100 lines. (Make sure you zoom into digitalised footage to measure the image, and not your screen !)

Now I have to admit that I didn’t quite go through with all of the different angles and apertures, and I’m not entirely certain that the resolution chart was printed to the correct size, but it doesn’t matter, as the difference between different shooting modes is obvious, even without meticulous shooting and calibration.

The images created by this process are reasonably large (1920×1080 to be precise), so I’m going to offer some small crops to discuss, and then offer up the full size images for download and examination at the end of the piece, if the mood takes you.

First up, a couple of 1:1 crops taken from the uncompressed HDMI output of the camera. This is with no HDV compression, so apart from JPG compression for the web these are the pixels as seen by the sensor. Obviously the lighting is a little low, but you can see that the resolution goes down to around 800 lines before it starts getting difficult to distinguish. All of the numbers and markings are easy to distinguish, and there aren’t any hugely obvious compression artifacts.