Photographer Vincente Sahuc has posted an extended reel of slow motion footage from one of Casio’s fantastically cheap, slow motion capable cameras [site | on CDM].

New York 2008 from Vicente Sahuc on Vimeo.

The video was shot at 300FPS, using a Steadicam Merlin and… Rollerskates! Some lovely editing, a great soundtrack and a variety of locations and shot types kept me completely mesmerized.

Ed.: So, this raises the eternal question: what camera should a visualist buy? I’ve wound up grabbing some great footage with an ordinary point-and-shoot. The problem is, SLRs have many, many advantages for photography - and video choices are limited. (The HD-shooting Nikon D90 is an important exception, but it costs twice as much as this Casio.) The Casio is pricey for what amounts to a prosumer megazoom, at US$700 street, but that footage is quite nice. So now we have to see whether those cheaper upcoming Casio’s can do nearly as good — then your killer combo would be a cheap, smaller Casio and a low-end SLR for your stills. Well, plus a conventional HD camera, of course. Okay, economy, we need some help — we can’t do all the lifting ourselves. -PK

It’s no secret that I’m obsessed with slow motion video, and you people aren’t doing a very good job of hiding your interest either - “high speed camera price” was our #5 search term for the last month. The article that search result points to is from August 2006, and back then a camera shooting 500FPS@440×330 would set you back US$8800.

2008 was the year slow motion really hit the mainstream, and now Casio has once again lowered the barrier by releasing two new compact cameras which take slow motion video up to 1000FPS.

The EX-FS10 ($350) and EX-FC100 ($400) both shoot at 1000, 420 and 210 FPS. No word yet on the actual resolution, but it seems that there’s similar cropping and downscaling going on, so it’s likely that they’ll be similar to the EX-F1, whose 300FPS mode gave you 512×384px.

Update: Resolutions are mentioned on dkamera.de, thanks Mario:
210 fps: 480×360
420 fps: 224×168
1000 fps: 224×56

Has anyone had the chance to use any of these cameras? Are they as cool as my geekdreams would have me believe?

[via Popular Mechanics]

Here’s a belated US Independence Day celebration, in a style Create Digital Motion readers are sure to appreciate: filled with the sounds of Sigur Ros, and lots of backwards slow motion. Nothing against John Phillip Sousa, of course. “Be kind to your friends in the swamp,” indeed. (What, am I the only person who knows those lyrics? I mean, aside from, bizarrely, the National Institutes of Health?)

But I expect you’ll enjoy some more chilled-out celebrations of the birth of America (as always, click through to our friends at Vimeo for HD):

The Fourth from Michael Brodner (AIM: Upstate14) on Vimeo.

Camera used:

Creator Michael Brodner writes “I shoot with a Sony HDR FX1. Got it about a year ago and love it. Although I think I like the "look" of the EX1 a little better.”

Related:

Casio Exilim EX-F1 in the Wild: Slow-Motion Invades the Mainstream

Slow Motion Pixels: Sony Smooth Slow Record Resolution Tested on HVR-V1P

If you’re confused by the Sony model numbers, these are all variations of the same basic camera we’re talking here. The HVR-V1P Jaymis uses is a PAL camera / not for US use (the US has the HVR-V1U). The HDR FX1 is likewise a “prosumer” model in the same approximate family. The EX1 Michael mentions is a higher-end Sony camera, in a difference range and currently with a street of about twice as much cash. (Yeah, that makes the FX1 look better all the time.)

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.

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)