Breaking the Speed Limit -- Editing Phantom High-Speed Footage in Final Cut Pro: Part 1 of 2

I wrote two articles for the Final Cut Pro User's Group Supermeet at NAB. They appeared in the SuperMag magazine. Here's part one of the second article looking at Simplemente's work with the Phantom HD camera:

Rune Hansen and Monica Reina at Simplemente in Mexico City recently acquired a Phantom HD Digital Cinema camera from Vision Research. We got to shoot a bunch of slow-motion footage and then worked with it in Final Cut Pro to create demo reels for theatrical projection. We needed to accomplish all of this in the space of about 48 hours.

The Phantom HD’s claim to fame is the ability to shoot uncompressed, high speed footage at up to 1,000 frames per second (fps) and up to 2K (2048x2048 pixels) resolution using a special CMOS imager. It accepts standard PL-mount 35mm cinema lenses and is also capable of capturing in standard and HD resolutions from 1 fps all the way up to 1,000.

Working with uncompressed 2K images means two things: number one, you need a huge amount of really fast storage capability just to shoot at 2K 1,000 fps; and number two, manipulating it in FCP is going to be a bit of a challenge. We’ll get to the FCP workflow in a little bit. As for how the camera itself handles all of that data, the Phantom comes with 16 or 32 GB of on board ultra-high speed flash RAM. At 1,000 fps/uncompressed 2K, 32 GB is about 8.8 seconds of recording time.

Eight seconds might not sound like much coming from the world of standard shooting speeds. But at 1,000 fps that translates into an 8,700 frame clip that takes 6 minutes and 6 seconds to play back at 24 fps, in remarkably sharp and detailed slow-motion. Typically you’re shooting an event that only takes a few milliseconds or at most a few seconds to occur like an explosion or a car zooming by, so it’s actually very ample for most instances. You also can get a CineMag which gives you up to 256 or 512 GB more, albeit at relatively slower recording rates for when you need to capture an event much longer in duration. You still get up to 450 fps with the CineMag, which is not too shabby either.

Something else interesting I learned working with the Phantom is that you’re not stuck with the typical start/stop recording method you have with most cameras. If you think about it this would make an eight second record time fairly challenging. Let’s say you’re filming a soccer game and you want to get a goal from the kick to the score. That means you’d have to start recording the instant it looked like someone was about to kick and then hope they actually make the goal within the following 8 seconds, which would be quite difficult to nail perfectly every time.

To counter this, the Phantom has an operator adjustable circular recording buffer. This means that the camera is actually always capturing to RAM and that you can trigger the recording to be saved at any point. So let’s say we set the buffer for 4 seconds and then wait for the goal. The goal is made and then I hit the trigger. The camera will now save the 4 seconds in the past before I hit the trigger and the 4 seconds immediately after. This allows you to be very precise and it’s a lot of fun to sit there with the record trigger, which looks suspiciously like something Michael Bay would use to set off explosives. Part two coming....

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