camera work

[chuckkoton]

Can you say more about the way the cameras film in the new Federer high speed archive?
Thanks,
ck

[johnyandell]

These are high speed digital cameras that record to custom hard drives. One drive holds nine minutes of footage at 500 frames a second, and they take about 8 hours to download to a storage drive!

The cameras are married to actual 35mm zoom cinema lenses. But they are controlled by a laptop which allows us to pick the settings and the filming is started and stopped by a manual trigger connected to the computer.
So it's a two man job--I usually handle the filming, panning, zooming and trying to keep the focus--it would be great to have a third hand for that, and one of our other guys runs the laptop--that's where a guy like Mike Kindred built up an expertise with his trigger work.

The software is tricky and buggy and there are such a wide variety of settings that we are still experimenting everytime we film. They are the same cameras you see in network sports broadcast super slow replays.

To me this latest evolution takes everything to a new level and I am thrilled to be able to start adding this footage to our archives.