Oppo the phone company based in Dongguan, China has released their flagship phone the Oppo Find X. Comparisons will be made to the iPhone X nut just in name but also on shape and design. However, the Oppo has no notch but it also has a similar aesthetic to the Galaxy S9 from Samsung but with the impressive feature which slides a motorized top part with both the rear and front cameras. Design wise this phone might be the most impressive and elegant phone ever made up to this point.
The phone has no 4k 60p like others in its class but does have 240fps 1080p and 480fps 720p video. There is something akin to this phone and the OnePlus 6 in that they share the video specs. Are these phones similarly built or it is just a fluke? We tend to see a homogenized spec sheet on these handsets as technology is standardized in China within camera modules. It is encouraging to see so many phones having the slow motion feature included and prominently displayed in the feature run-down.→ Continue Reading Full Post ←
NVIDIA has been hard at work on the problem posed by high frame rate interpolation of video data shot on lower fps. We have had this tech since the late 1990s with the advent of Twixtor and refined over the decades in systems like Twixtor Pro and Adobe’s Optical Flow in After Effects. You are still not getting real temporal detail data since the frames are created by extrapolating velocity and direction vectors plus pixel values between frames to get the result.
We explored this technique in our post on interpolation here and why it is no substitute from a real slow motion camera solution. NVIDIA’s new method uses machine learning along with 11,000 videos to arrive at a more convincing result. Considering the relatively small sample size we can imagine a future where hundreds of thousands or millions of footage samples are used to generate near flawless interpolation. This technique takes some serious computation and data sets so as of now it is not really ready for the mass market but that could change with the cloud very soon.→ Continue Reading Full Post ←
Panasonic has been known on having deals or rebates on cameras way before replacements are set to be unveiled. In that same manner, the latest price cuts or instant savings on the GH5 and GH5s make it a much easier proposition to get one of these cameras that shoots in the case of the GH5 up to 180fps 1080p and on the GH5s up to 240fps 1080p. In a previous post, we showed that the GH5s is actually less detailed in 1080p slow motion than the regular GH5s which suffers from more aliasing and moire artifacts.
The Chronos 1.4c Team has released the latest v0.3 RC2 software for testing. Be aware that this is not mission critical stable software so only use on your own private testing and not for recording mission critical shoots. The Interface can now be flipped to the left side though we would love to see an option to be concentrated on the lower part for better screen real-estate distribution.
We have tested over the last few days and are happy to report that the software has been stable and rock solid with no lock-ups and no sluggishness. The Color science was improved since the first v0.3 RC1 release to render the red colors among others more faithfully. In our testing, there was a definite improvement but we would like to see better treatment of the deep blues and magentas. We are happy to see White Balance is now supporting built-in presets!→ Continue Reading Full Post ←
The Rosalind Franklin Institute has started the development of a 100 million fps high-speed camera that will operate at 1-megapixel resolution to scan how new cancer drug treatments along with ultrasound interact to create effective cures for the deadliest forms of the disease. This type of performance is unheard of in that resolution and would herald a new way of looking at minute amounts of time that happen so fast no detector so far has been able to capture them at a usable resolution.
To put this in numbers, the camera will be able to capture a 100,000,000,000,000or One Hundred Trillion Pixels per second or one hundred million megapixels/sec. Those are staggering numbers and if saved in a raw format it would take a megabyte per frame or 100 Terabytes of imaging data/second. That will be one extremely large frame buffer. With compression techniques and image optimization you could probably get that number lower but if played back at 30fps it would take 38 days to see a single 1-second video, staggering speed for sure!→ Continue Reading Full Post ←
So nearly two years after the excellent RX100 V by Sony was released, which won on our recommendation for slow-motion camera on a budget for both 2016 and 2017, the new RX100 VI or the sixth iteration of this specific camera line has been announced. It keeps the same body size but out goes the fast f1.8-f2.4 lens of old which was surprisingly good for a now average f2.4 to f4.5 24-200mm equivalent or 8x optical zoom which is great as a do it all range. Many are not thrilled but we will have to see if the sensor advancements, the new 4 stop stabilization, and noise suppression works well enough to keep it an acceptable low light option.
Our main interest in these cameras lies in the fact that HFR mode or (High Frame Rate) has been a key selling point since the cameras first appeared. The RX 100 V improved resolution and recording time and we are glad to see that the new RX 100 VI maintains those specs. We estimate it will at least be the same 7sec in Shoot Time Priority and 4 seconds in Quality Priority.→ Continue Reading Full Post ←
