Any video that starts “deep in an underground bunker with Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman,” automatically gets a thumbs up from us. But you know something’s good when even “The Savage” himself is reduced to a 12-year-old giddy schoolboy at the sight of it. Enter, the ultra-highspeed bullet.
The clip was captured using Vision Research’s latest creation, the Phantom v2010, a camera capable of recording 12 gigapixels (that’s 12 billion pixels) of data per second. What does that mean? At its lowest resolution, this ludicrous machine can record 1,000,000 frames per second. Your iPhone records 60. A single second of real-time video taken at this ultra-highspeed would take 9.25 hours to watch. Yeah; holy sh**.
“The artifacts that you start to be able to see are just fascinating: mushroom clouds and little rivulets of gasses and fire, forming on flame fronts of pressure waves – it’s stuff that I’m not sure many people in the world have even looked at,” says Savage with a smirk so contagious you can’t help but follow suit. “I had no idea it would be that lovely. It’s … just really cool.”
That it is, Mr. Savage. That it is.
Now, before you let your slow-mo dreams of grandeur take hold, and start planning your next video, you should know that while Vision Research hasn’t released the price of the v2010, we can tell you that its predecessor, the v1610, sold for about the cost of an Audi R8 (around the $100,000 mark) – and that’s without a lens. You can bet the v2010 won’t be cheap.
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IMAGES: Discovery
