Shooting A Handgun In Front Of A High Speed Phantom Flex Camera

An Incredible look at high speed low drag videography:

High speed photography / videography are definitely relevant to my interests.  I’d like to get my hands on one of these for a day just to play around with!

10,000 FPS at 480p is damn impressive.  2.9 seconds though :/ It’s really too bad the buffer is so small, but I supposed that’s a limitation considering the processing power that is needed to dump that many frames every second to memory.  Seeing the lead fragments fly off the rifling when the bullet was in flight blew my mind.

Thoughts? Any of you guys ever play around with one of these?

Hat tip: MrColionNoir (who now has his own blog he’s working on MrColionNoir.com! I’m looking forward to seeing what direction he takes it )


Comments

13 responses to “Shooting A Handgun In Front Of A High Speed Phantom Flex Camera”

  1. some pretty awesome footage… but surely, that comment at the end should be “that lead bullet is no match for the steel target…”

    “You must be chairman of the pedantic society!”

    “Vice chairman, actually…”

  2. Just freakin cool.

    You could tell he’s a camera geek, not guns. But it was neat to see.

  3. nice to see what I was taught, and what I now teach actually visible (the throw [rotation] of the bullet).
    would like to film my action on one of those to see where I am going wrong.

    1. Thats a good idea.

  4. I’m wondering if that’s lead flying off the bullet or just unburned powder…they look pretty uniform and possibly a round flake powder.

    Looks like a total metal jacket bullet, so it would be copper, not lead, and likely nothing metallic at all, but waste powder, or burnt powder residue.

    1. FlynnCastle Avatar
      FlynnCastle

      That was my guess too, that it was just carbon.

    2. Yeah, I don’t see how it could be lead if that was a jacketed round.

      Unburnt powder or carbon for sure.

  5. It’s cool video, but it makes me wonder what setup Micheal Bane’s group uses on Gun Stories. They seem to have a frame rate approaching 10,000 at times – maybe 5000? I’ve seen the bullets going down range many times. But their video is in sharper focus all the time – better depth of field. The narrator did say it was an f2.1 lens, and you won’t get depth of field with that kind of f ratio. Chances are it’s the lens, not the camera that’s making the difference.

    I know that Gun Stories shoots at Gunsite in Arizona, and probably pick very bright days to shoot, while these guys had an overcast day.

    1. nikonmikon Avatar

      The Gun Stories crew probably has a ton of off-camera lighting. If this guy had some he could have stopped that lens down to get more depth of field and you could see the projectile fly further while still being in the focal plane. I think he could also have used a much shorter lens. The lens he was using seemed to be pretty tele. Too much zoom = not enough depth of field.

  6. Thanks for Colins blog link!

  7. I seriously need to get my hands on one of those camera’s. There are so many things that I want to show people haha

  8. elephantrider Avatar
    elephantrider

    About the 9:18 mark you can see copper particles flying off of the base of the flying bullet. Pretty cool. If it was an open base bullet it would be lead particles as well.

  9. Andrew Saliga Avatar
    Andrew Saliga

    Very cool. I follow Tom on Twitter, but missed this vid. I always love when two passions merge.

    I was on a shoot about a year ago where we used a Phantom HD Gold to record some basketball players. We were only shooting around 500fps and could see the sweat beading off of the players as they moved. It took two or three 20K lights to light the scene for that framerate. We weren’t using 360 degree shutter like Tom is though.

    There is an ad agency here in town that does a lot of work for Remington, and I know they’ve been using the Phantom frequently. Anxious to see the resulting spots.