cheapest way to 60fps?

bluechair84

Seems to me like the holy grail of sports footage is a fast framerate. The footage of anything shooting at 25fps just seems to miss all the action. Go Pros new 960 model only reaches 60fps in it's lowest resolution and still looks pretty good.
But they're new... and a bit expensive for me right now. So,does anyone know of a cheapskate way of doing it? I thought maybe an older camera in the sack with a bullet cam extension but - I know sod all about camera equipment. It's a shame our sony SLR doesn't take a bullet cam as the footage on that is great.

mrfmilo

Tape a DSLR to your head?

But no, don't think there's any 'onboard' camers at 60fps and 720p.

bluechair84

mrfmilo wrote:

Tape a DSLR to your head?

But no, don't think there's any 'onboard' camers at 60fps and 720p.

I'd look like some bloody daleak that's just upgraded from the standard toilet plunger :shock:

But do you think it needs 720p? the Go Pro looks pretty good at 420p and 60fps. Is this the cheapest / best option or is there an old hack you can do with a vhs recorder in your sack

joshtp

we need another £12 Veho Muvi moment.


That was an awesome BR moment.

Check out Ebay, it's amazing what you can get for £20 if your willing to wait and get it from HK

bluechair84

yeah I've been looking at DVRs with little bullet cams but, even the £200+ ones are still at 30fps. I'm browsing to see if I can find an old and cheap camcorder that has component in sockets to take a bullet cam. One camcorder I broswed for £100 odd could take upto 120fps 8) That would be a smooooth homemovie. Though you'd probably look like you'd been drawn for a southpark short.

bluechair84

oh - i got one of those £12 vehos but found I couldn't keep the battery charged long enough. Lasted all of two minutes. Was a real shame.

joshtp

bluechair84 wrote:

oh - i got one of those £12 vehos but found I couldn't keep the battery charged long enough. Lasted all of two minutes. Was a real shame.

shame... mines not as good as once was... but still like an hour

bluechair84

I'll give it another go actually, you've inspired me to return to what I already have. I want to capture a local DH run and eventually build an interesting frame-mounted boom. The cheap-ho (see what I did there?) will do for practise runs until I figure out a ghetto 60fps setup 8)

butcher of bakersfield

Maybe I'm lost in a new world of technology here, but 25fps is standard for video and television in the UK. And unless it's slowed down massively (i.e. bullet coming out of gun in slow mo..) then it should be smooth as silk.

What are you guys trying to capture??

bluechair84

Nearly all the mountain biking home vids I have watched have been almost unbearable because of the slow framerate - at least, I'm testing the water that a better picture could be achieved through higher FPS rather than higher resolution. Higher res surely only matters if you are watching on a higher res screen.
30fps vs 60fps

Off road biking tends to put the rider much closer to fast moving stuff like shrubs which become blurred, far worse than other sports where the fast moving action is further away.

bluechair84

And though TV is transmitted at 25fps, it is filmed at a far far far higher rate. The transmitted footage isn't blurred with longer individual exposures because the original wasn't shot at 25fps so it still looks crisp.

Putting my neck out with this post - don't forget I did say I didn't know owt about recording

thekickingmule

bluechair84 wrote:

Nearly all the mountain biking home vids I have watched have been almost unbearable because of the slow framerate

Are you watching them on your computer? If so, it's more likely to be a RAM/Monitor/Screen Refresh problem, not the 25fps rate.
Do you have a problem watching old movies? Say from the mid 90's earlier? They were all done at 25-30fps as far as I'm aware.

chedabob

Kodak ZX1 does 60fps. Picture quality is a bit cack though.

butcher of bakersfield

bluechair84 wrote:

Nearly all the mountain biking home vids I have watched have been almost unbearable because of the slow framerate - at least, I'm testing the water that a better picture could be achieved through higher FPS rather than higher resolution.

...

far worse than other sports where the fast moving action is further away.

You may be right. I haven't watched many MTB vids, so I can't comment on that. But I'd be surprised.

Everything, until recently, has been 25fps, and I've never noticed this phenomena before. Besides occasionally from shoddy cameras. I think it might be something other than frame rate tbh.

Have you got any of this footage?

phz

chedabob wrote:

Kodak ZX1 does 60fps. Picture quality is a bit cack though.

kodak Zi8 will do 60fps @ 720p - but its a 'flip' format camera so no good for helmet mount etc. - might be possible to ghetto something like a phone car mount cradle to create a frame mount for it though.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Kodak-Zi8-Pocke ... 536&sr=8-1

slainte 8) rob

chedabob

pHz wrote:

chedabob wrote:

Kodak ZX1 does 60fps. Picture quality is a bit cack though.

kodak Zi8 will do 60fps @ 720p - but its a 'flip' format camera so no good for helmet mount etc. - might be possible to ghetto something like a phone car mount cradle to create a frame mount for it though.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Kodak-Zi8-Pocke ... 536&sr=8-1

slainte 8) rob

The ZX1 has a tripod thread on the bottom. My mate has a ghetto mount made out of two old light brackets. Kodak also make an official one but it's a bit pricey for a bolt and a few straps.

Anonymous

bluechair84 wrote:

And though TV is transmitted at 25fps, it is filmed at a far far far higher rate.

you are talking completely and utterly out of your arris.
Go smash your head against a wall, it'll do you some good.


The trouble with 60fps (compared to 30) is that you need either a sensor that's twice as sensitive, or a lens that allows through twice the amount of light.
High sensitivity sensors increase image "noise", degrading the quality.
A lens with a wider aperture that will allow twice the amount of light through will reduce the depth of field (the range of distance that is in focus). This makes it very very hard to get a helmet cam to be focused where you want it.
Since there is no cameraman, they generally use as small an aperture as they can possibly get away with, to get as much of the scene in focus as possible.

Anonymous

thekickingmule wrote:

Do you have a problem watching old movies? Say from the mid 90's earlier? They were all done at 25-30fps as far as I'm aware.

All FILM movies are still 24 frames per second. It's been a standard for.... ooh, forever.

Cinema = 24 fps.
American pre HD telly = 29.97 fps (long, bloody stupid story)
pretty much everywhere else pre HD = 25 fps.

HDTV has pretty much stuck to these standards, although I think that 29.97 has lost favour to 30fps.

cooldad

yeehaamcgee wrote:

American pre HD telly = 29.97 fps (long, bloody stupid story)

Go on then I like stupid stories.

Anonymous

It's all to do with technology, you wouldn't understand it. Go and collect your pension instead.

bluechair84

Hmm, I'd assumed because professional video cameras could record at higher FPS, they would do which would be part of the reason why the image looks crisp.

So are you saying then that films are recored at 25fps and then played at 25fs? So framerate has less to do with the quality of the footage than resolution... or aperture size?

Anonymous

Professional video cameras do what they do incredibly well. So they film at 25 or 30 frames per second, and excel at it. I think you might be getting confused with high-speed cameras, like the ones they use on Mythbusters, that can shoot at 1000+ frames per second.
The reason they use those at such high frame rates is so they can slow the footage down to 25 or 30 fps, and give a very slow motion view of things. But in order to film at such high frame rates, they need incredible amounts of lights, so that they can use the fast shutter speeds.
But, those cameras don't produce as good an image as normal TV cams.

What gives a professional video camera it's image quality is the very large sensor, and the very high quality optics in the lens.
The lenses alone will cost you more than a car, in fact.

Now this next bit I'm not so sure about, but from a talk with a broadcast video engineer, I believe that a 1080p video camera will have a sensor resolution around 4 to 5 times as high as the output image. The electronics in the sensor will analyze a group of sensor pixels, and take the average to produce the image pixels. This helps to reduce the noise and grainyness in the image.
I think I understood that last bit correctly, but I can't guarantee 100% that I did.

welshkev

it also has something to do with 'pro' cameras having 3ccd's which as i understand it process the colours etc. which improves quality

Anonymous

welshkev wrote:

it also has something to do with 'pro' cameras having 3ccd's which as i understand it process the colours etc. which improves quality

Nah, the advantage of the 3CCDs is tat you get a very large sensor for each colour, basically.
The colour balance and so on are done by the engineers either in the "scanner" truck on a multi camera or studio shoot, or in editing in a simple single camera setup.

In fact, almost all the camera's controls are taken care of by the engineers in the trucks. The camerafolk frame and focus the shot, and that's about it (again, in a studio or multi-camera setup). Th engineers control the gain (video equivalent to a stills camera ISO rating), shutter speed, and aperture, as well as colour gamma levels and curves. Video cameras of this grade can do some very peculiar things with brightness curves which stills cameras (at any level) cannot. And again, those are controlled and set by the engineers.
It's common practice for all cameras on set to have their shutters synchronised together, all driven by a master clock in the trucks. This makes it less troublesome when switching from one camera feed to another.
And it's also common for the frame rate to stay constant, and have the exposure controlled purely by aperture, or changing gain.

bluechair84

God damn it. I was going to chuck an old camcorder in the backpack with a bullet cam mounted on the frame but... it sounds as if the cheapest way to get Go Pro quality is... to go Go Pro.
So a handycam that can shoot at 100fps (if I could find one with a component input) and bullter cam wouldn't be any better? I suppose it is limited by the optics in the bullet cam.

welshkev

yeehaamcgee wrote:

welshkev wrote:

it also has something to do with 'pro' cameras having 3ccd's which as i understand it process the colours etc. which improves quality

Nah, the advantage of the 3CCDs is tat you get a very large sensor for each colour, basically.
The colour balance and so on are done by the engineers either in the "scanner" truck on a multi camera or studio shoot, or in editing in a simple single camera setup.

In fact, almost all the camera's controls are taken care of by the engineers in the trucks. The camerafolk frame and focus the shot, and that's about it (again, in a studio or multi-camera setup). Th engineers control the gain (video equivalent to a stills camera ISO rating), shutter speed, and aperture, as well as colour gamma levels and curves. Video cameras of this grade can do some very peculiar things with brightness curves which stills cameras (at any level) cannot. And again, those are controlled and set by the engineers.
It's common practice for all cameras on set to have their shutters synchronised together, all driven by a master clock in the trucks. This makes it less troublesome when switching from one camera feed to another.
And it's also common for the frame rate to stay constant, and have the exposure controlled purely by aperture, or changing gain.

i was actually 'racking' cameras on monday so i should really know more about it...

Anonymous

No frame rate has absolutely nothing to do with image quality. Your eyes can only see so many "frames" per second anyway.
You WILL get better quality on most gear by filing at 25 frames per second (instead of 100), which lets in more light per frame into the sensor, giving a better, lower noise exposure.

Anonymous

welshkev wrote:

i was actually 'racking' cameras on monday so i should really know more about it...

I only know what i know because of being a photographer, and being one of those types that wants to learn how everything works. So when I'm doing the sound recording on a shoot, and I have some downtime, i'll wander around and investimigate stuff, and moider (and get moidered) by the engineers/camerapeople/producers/lighting guys etc

Northwind

The only point of higher framerate for these things is slow motion- if you want to go all Life Cycles and show absolutely every bit of riding at half speed it's useful, though your viewers are going to kill you.

Much cheaper is to just ride very slowly and pretend it's in slow motion.

Anonymous

I find it quite annoying when there's loads of slow moiton in mountain bike films. I mean mountain biking is hardly the highest speed thing anyway.
It's nice as an occasional effect, but it seems to be getting overused these days.

Northwind

It's quite good for crashes though Especially with a bit of slowed down sound. OHHHHHHHHH FFFFFFFFFFFFFUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU