Today we have another shot of a light bulb burning itself out and the smoke exiting from a small hole.
Materials
60watt Black light bulb.
Procedure
Create a hole in the bulb. I used a dremel tool to take care of that.
Result
The filament heats up and then proceeds to produce a thick (pleasant looking) smoke before burning out.
Observations
I like this one because you get to see the smoke contained by a barrier, while at the same time you get to see a limited amount escape and curl around the barrier. The smoke is also rather pretty in and of itself.
Additional notes
If it looks like I’m scraping the bottom of the barrel for my clips, it would be because I am. I am currently in-between cameras so I’m searching through things I’ve not posted in the past because I had better clips to post. Hopefully this situation will change in the near future.
This is another shot of Matt Deal (of Matt Deal Farms fame) jumping off of a deck into a pond.
Materials
A dock and a pond.
Procedure
Instruct a man to jump off a dock. It is quite amazing what one can get people to do if one has a camera. People seem to feel quite natural and somewhat fearless in front a camera. I can’t explain it, though it would be interesting to listen to someone who can. Perhaps one of our readers is a psychologist and can illuminate this for us.
Observations
This shot is another great look at the muscles of a well toned person. The subject in question has over years of farming toned his body up quite completely. Makes for an excellent video subject for a study in bio-mechanics. I plan on subject Matt to many more indignities over the years for your viewing pleasure. Next time I think I’ll make him take a few swings with a bat at a small, round moving object. Again, the splash is wonderful as usual. The light catches it all nicely. Poor Matt in this shot was unaware that the pond was only a few feet deep, much to his surprise. Sadly I don’t have enough disk space to export the entire clip (yes I filled up yet another hard drive, over 1TB of data now!) but I still have the original so when my new drive shows up I’ll re-export this shot and do a close up on his rather surprised face. It is quite amusing.
Today we take a closer look at a video we posted a while ago. In this video we have pushed in to put you right at the center of the explosion. There is enough detail to actually watch the vectors of the fluid movement.
Materials
We can skip this, if you don’t know how to make this already, you don’t need to be making it.
Procedure
Detonate using electronic detonation.
Result
This is a crop of the previous video found here. This puts you right in the center of the raging fireball. You can see the movement of the fireball fairly clearly in this video. It is interesting to note how the flames move and evolve. At speeds like this you really get a chance to see things that are ordinarily invisible to the eye, the motion and formation of the fireball being one of those things.
Today we have yet another death of a water balloon. In this particular situation, the balloon was in a gold fish bowl.
Materials
A goldfish bowl.
A water balloon, blue.
Observation
This is an interesting shot. Primarily because the water is contained and cannot escape in the normal manner by which water likes to escape. The water, not being aware that it was trapped in a goldfish bowl, still tries to escape to no avail. Having failed to notice that it failed to escape the water continues about its business of playing with gravity in a not entirely unpleasing manner. The bubbles are neat too.
Today we take a look at another video from the wonderful SA-1.
Materials
A martini glass, some red food coloring and some sprite.
Procedure
Place a few drops of food coloring in the base of the glass. Pour in the sprite.
Result
I chose red food coloring initially to make sure it showed up against blue however it worked out wonderfully as it looks like the clear sprite is picking up the color from the glass itself. Initially there was much more footage to this particular shot but in my zeal to clean up I unplugged the wrong cable and cut the power to the camera, cutting of the saving of the files. Since these cameras store the footage in volatile RAM, cutting the power clears your footage. Oops. The flicker is a result of using those FotoDiox Cool Light’s, one of these days I’ll hopefully be able to replace them with some respectable HMI Lights.
Today we have something a little different and a little special. Yesterday Rick Burmeister from MCT dropped by for a few hours to show me some of the new toys they have. We took a look at the new Photron SA-1 high-speed camera. Let me start by saying I was incredibly impressed with this camera. The image quality was wonderful in the two lighting situations we tested it in. The light sensitivity is really amazing. With these cameras you need as much light sensitivity as you can get, especially considering this camera will run at 5400fps at its full resolution of 1024×1024. This makes for a monster. Now on to the subject of the delay for todays post.
One of the really neat features that Rick showed me was the the ability to shift the visible bits from the 12bit image the SA-1 captures. What this allows you to do is adjust the brightness of the image, shifting to the darker bits allows you to capture detail that would have ordinarily blown out and shifting the other direction allows you to bring out the details that were in shadow and normally muddy. This is a useful feature when you are filming anything that has the potential to blow out to ranges that are normally incomprehensible, rocket engines, explosions etc. All while maintaining the other items in the scene. In the software you are only able to view and export these. This brings me to the topic of HDR (High Dynamic Range) Imaging. HDR is excellently defined (with samples) here. Unfortunately, the ability to capture motion with HDR was all but impossible with current digital high-speed cameras. The SA-1 opens the doors just a crack for us. After exporting three different versions of the same footage using the bit shifter, I started on the process of figuring out how to do this with video. After several hours of searching and experimenting I was unable to figure out how to get video sequences processed into a tone mapped image sequence. There were not any tools I could find that would make the process simple or even feasible so I contacted a few of my friends and started the process rolling to either find or make something that would do it. Chad Boyda was able to cobble together a basic setup that would allow for the batch processing of the thousands of frames the SA-1 kicks out through a HDR application, FDR Tools. The process we worked out is clunky, slow and results in a bit of strobe in the video, but the resulting image has far more detail than is normally available. Future versions of the tool should negate that strobe. Now just to disclaim, the source images are not precisely what one would get shooting with a bracketed f-stop so the process does not yield quite the same results, but it is closer than normal.
I’ve included the original video as well as three images that represent the three different videos that were processed to produce the final shown above.
Procedure
Throw the pine cone, then giggle as does some really silly things to try and grab it.
Observations
Dogs do some rather odd things to pick up something thats been intentionally thrown to the ground. This is certainly no exception. I like this shot because it allows us to again look at the muscles in the dog and how they move and shift under his skin. Its also a rather amusing shot, for obvious reasons. King, while huge, is still very much a puppy and the awkwardness that comes with that territory is evident in nearly everything this dog does. However, at the same time there is a certain amount of elegance to the whole thing, though perhaps that stems more from the slow motion and less from the dog.
