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)

Despite the many gigs I’ve played in my time as a VJ - including over 80 in the last year of touring - I am yet to record my output on a single live show. It sounds terrible, but I know I’m not alone in this: Both musicians and visual performers I’ve worked with tend to focus on creating the show itself, rather than documenting the output. Musicians have a plethora of hardware available for recording audio, and the visual market is starting to get some wider options.

High-end video hardware creators Blackmagic (previously on CDMo) have released the “Video Recorder” (not sure if I’m keen on that product name), a $200 USB device which will “record” analogue “video” (ok, turns out I’m fine with it) in H264 format straight to your hard drive.

The base model lets you choose from Component, S-Video or Composite, and for $100 more you can get the SDI version; for all of those production houses which inexplicably don’t have any devices which allow capturing of video to computers.

Currently only Mac software is mentioned on the Blackmagic site, but that does look quite friendly, with simple buttons to select the source and output formats, and an interface for cropping out analogue weirdness from the stream.

There are other devices which fulfill similar roles, such as the aforementioned Pinnacle Video Transfer (available now), or “multimedia” hard drive enclosures from dubiously-able manufacturers, but something which isn’t much bigger than a thumb drive and coming from a company known for their high-quality video devices could just succeed. (via Gizmodo)

No matter how committed you are to some of the alternatives, Google’s YouTube will remain part of your online life. So we continue our look at how to make it more livable.

Readers wrote in with some tips and impressions of YouTube’s new "higher-quality video" mode:

Make Your YouTube More Livable: I Have a Fast Connection Setting

Richard Lainhart, a regular on Create Digital Music (attention, Buchla modular fans!), had some specific tips on which upload settings to use and how to force high-quality playback:

Going mobile with video is looking sexier all the time. So far, we’ve been watching:

Apple’s lovely new iPods, all with component video out
An HP gaming device from the future (which may never show up, but could also be implemented on the proliferating embedded Linux mobile boxes around)

Now, Microsoft has given the Zune a badly-needed upgrade. The best part: real video support. I’m waiting on my contacts at Apple for more details, but Paul Thurrott beat me to the video specs, so here they are from him:

About Zune 2.0 video compatibility

Here’s the story: Like the iPod classic, the new Zune 4, 8, and 80 support H.264, MPEG-4, and WMV formats up to 640 x 480 natively. This means you can load a 640 x 480 (or whatever) H.264 movie on to the Zune and it won’t have to transcode it to a 320 x [whatever] format, as was (and is) the case with the Zune 30. This is great news. On the device’s screen, video will be scaled down to QVGA (320 x 240) as you’d expect, and if you use TV Out, you get full fidelity. Excellent.