Krontech.ca the makers of the Chronos affordable professional high speed camera have released the Software version 0.4.0 Beta of the camera platform. The cameras will now be using an embedded build of the Debian operating system which was already the default OS for the Chronos 2.1 HD. All Chronos 1.4c cameras can now be upgraded to the new Beta version free of charge Follow this link for the official thread.
We tested the software briefly and found it to be responsive and solid. However as a Beta, you should be ready to find some glitches here and there, if you are doing mission-critical work you should wait for a full release before updating to be on the safe side, we recommend it for most users who are not shooting once in a lifetime events. If you do find bugs please contact them to help squash them out.→ Continue Reading Full Post ←
Beyond the press, Youtube channel from Finland has posted an incredible video that showcases the power of 72 Chronos 1.4 cameras in the Chronos Ring system to deliver 330,000 fps making it able to capture Oxy-Acetylene gas explosions at ridiculously slow speeds. It is so fast that a single camera would have to travel at 43.175 Kilometers/second which is over 5x faster than the International Space Station. That is the power of daisy-chaining slow motion gear that is considerably inexpensive compared to high priced options and giving you incredible results. Props for the Team at Krontech.ca for sharing their system with the world. More info about the Chronos Camera and the Chronos Ring at: https://www.krontech.ca
“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 Tesla500 Youtube Channel is at it again with an impressive build and experiment. David Kronstein the creator of the Chronos has attached a camera to a specially modified mower and blade assembly to shoot what a lawnmower does directly on the blade’s edge. The mower was only run at 1/2 speed, to avoid a camera failure, resulted in about 180 G-forces at the edge of the camera.
Needless to say, it really shows how good the camera is at withstanding abuse. While we do not condone you do this with any camera it is cool to know it can be done and still have beautiful high speed imagery to go with it. Congrats to David for the successful build! The G-forces involved would kill any living thing with a brain in seconds hence why a camera is a good subject, Please don’t try this at home! Watch the video below:→ Continue Reading Full Post ←
The Chronos 1.4c team based in B.C. Canada has been hard at work unleashing the features of the camera hardware and adding software features that should make the camera more valuable to video professionals everywhere. The new firmware adds HDMI live mirroring support for monitoring which is clean and lets you record its output. Another feature is the inclusion of native CinemaDNG save format image sequences which retain 16bits of color data and allow you to really streamline the workflow without time-consuming conversions.
In our testing over the last 4 days, we have really put the firmware “available here” through its paces and found very minimal issues in the software related to usability but no freezes and rock solid operation over around 14hrs of operation. By saving to CinemaDNG we have no issues with cards getting write space errors due to saving the 1.8MB files individually. We feel this format is really unleashing the camera’s quality fully with a faithful sensor capture representation.→ Continue Reading Full Post ←
The Chronos 1.4 team has been hard at work on firmware improvements. The latest pre-released software patch shared with HSC improves the h.264 file quality at the pixel level by using a new demosaic algorithm to better match the real camera output. We did a few sample tests to see how big an improvement it is and also to maybe ditch the slow and space eating RAW 16bit workflow which is our preferred file saving format as it retains all the sensor information.
The new improvements are already available to the community as a beta in this post. It is very stable it should immediately improve the way you work with the camera. Also, a new roadmap of upcoming firmware releases was shared in the forums which include HDMI monitoring and a complete OS change to Debian Linux from the current Arago distro for the camera which should improve development and speed in implementing features.→ Continue Reading Full Post ←
