In what could be summed up as a big milestone day in affordable slow motion, Krontech.ca the company behind the excellent 720p 1500fps Chronos 1.4c slow motion camera has now announced ready for pre-order a new 1080p Full HD 1000fps slow motion camera that starts at a bargain basement price of $5,000 US Dollars. Considering just a few years ago this performance in the Phantom camera space was a six-figure proposition, this is major progress towards a camera that we have been waiting for a long time.
“Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the “Chronos 68″ made of 48 Chronos 1.4 cameras thus able to process 68 Gpx/s. Is anyone in to buy?” Krontech.ca
Being this April 1st which could make it an April Fools prank we are cautious about calling this a real rig, or product, but it sure looks pretty capable as a way to capture a 360-degree view of something. Whatever the case, this is probably not going to be cheap but geared to professional movie making or very hardcore labs. Krontech.ca website here!What do you think?-HSC
The Spanish company Cinemartin known for their camera monitors is now officially launching the Fran 8k line of cameras in three flavors. The Fran 8k LT at an introductory price of €7,920 Euros or $9,000 USD which shoots 8k at 24p and up to 96fps in 2k resolution in either DNG RAW, PNG or ProRes while sporting a 37 mm x 27 mm (Diagonal 46.2 mm) sensor size slightly larger than a Full Frame 35mm. The LT version will not sport features like Programmability and image stabilization which the other higher cost models will support.
The cameras are built to order and require a 10% deposit when reserved. They are geared at the commercial and cinema markets which require the utmost image quality and 8k resolution on a very large sensor. The frame rates at 4k max out at 60p and at 2k max out at 120fps on the two higher-end models. The introductory prices will only be available until 31st of December 2018. looking at the video samples released it is clear the quality of the image will be cinematic and contain extreme detail. The file sizes will also be enormous but that is to be expected with a frame size of 7920px * 3024px or 24Megapixels on the LT and 47MP on the Plus!→ Continue Reading Full Post ←
Sony has released an altered version of the RX100 V camera for the Australian market which keeps all of the good features of the RX100 V camera but also changes it’s internals and software to allow for increased buffer space for images and video in HFR mode and allows the AF module to include the Fast Hybrid AF system with 315 focal-plane phase-detection points to match that of the RX100 VI which was announced just last month.
The memory increase itself allows for 24fps continuous shooting with a buffer up to 148 JPEG frames. That also allows improved High Frame Rate recording times, and fast continuous AF with stills and while recording UHD 4K video. Recording of 7 seconds of recording in Shoot Time Priority at the 240 fps setting which matches the one in the regular RX100 V and RX100 VI in America.→ Continue Reading Full Post ←
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 ←
