High Speed Camera Systems

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Categories: Acquisition, Images

It has been standard practice from the early days of film to shoot film at a higher rate, over- cranking, then it will be played back at normal speed to produce a slow-motion effect of high quality. However there was a limit to the speed at which film can be run through the camera. Many complex designs for film transports have been tried but they are limited to around 400 frames per second depending on film size and framing. Early uses in military applications were picked up by the creative community for dramatic effect.

Electronic imaging systems do not have the issues of moving a mass of film past the lens and once the problems of high speed digitization and storage were solved it allowed imaging up to 1,000,000 frames a second at low resolution. Most modern cameras are capable of some over-cranking to a few hundred frames per second and from there specialist cameras are available to cover high resolution and speeds of several thousand frames/second.