At the invitation of Alga Panavision France Binocle recently conducted a 3D workshop at an open house in Aubervilliers. The theme was shooting high-speed stereoscopic footage using the Vision Research Phantom Flex camera. Alga Panavision made available two Phantom Flex cameras in order to assess the viability and performance for this type of usage. Both cameras were equipped with optical Master premium Zeiss 25 mm and were mounted on a Binocle Brigger III stereoscopic rig. The resulting two video streams were managed by Binocle’s visualization software Disparity Tagger and were fed to two 46-inch TV screens. An Astro 3D tilt complemented everything. Vision Research’s in-house software for Phantom on the PC was then handling the triggering of cameras and allowed users to choose specific sequences amongst the different saved rushes for playback. Céline Tricart stereographer on this operation said “We have not encountered any major problems regarding synchronization as have been observed at these speeds in the past.” The simplicity of storage of the video streams was well received; previous tests required the use of heavy computer equipment for recording. The two Phantom Flex cameras were each equipped with a Cinemag which included a 512 GB hard drive. Once saved and without proxy synchronized images were immediately available and viewable at 25 100 or 300 frames/sec. Spilling liquid spinning hair shooting confetti and other various scenes were filmed at a speed of 300 1000 and 2564 frames per second the maximum speed of the Phantom Flex RAW in HD format. The camera can reach up to 10700 images at lower definitions.
