Re: High speed camera vs. HD video

On Apr 15, 3:14 pm, "AKA gray asphalt" <benvh...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Is there a difference between quick still cameras and
HD video? How big of enlargements can you get from
the video?

Thanks, I'm thinking about a small wedding
photo business.

Besides the technical aspects already mentioned, shooting stills is a
very different discipline artistically (using the term loosely). A
completely different type of visualization is involved because a still
has to carry more implicit information than a video and the
photographer is involved in a different imagining process. It
happens, but it is rare, that a still from a video has the emotional
or aesthetic impact that a specifically shot still can have.

Videos have their effect on a viewer as a result of being a captured
segment of time and reducing that segment to a singular moment of time
usually results in a snapshot. Very occassionaly, I have worked with
a very talented and award winning videographer and I wouldn't try and
do what he does any more than he wants to try and do what I do. Give
me his video equipment and I come up with imaginative home movies. A
still camera in his hands results in very good, but somewhat sterile
images that just barely get beyond being snapshots.

I also don't see good economics. A video image can be up res'd and
the image quality vastly improved using some very fancy mathematics
and multiple frames. The best software for doing this isn't cheap,
either. The software and the hardware to run it effectively will set
you back somewhere in the range of $3,500 - $5,000 USD. For my setup,
though I use the software for doing something other than making fair
stills out of crummy video frames, it's $3,000 for Matlab and $700 for
the Matlab package that does the work.

For any given image, you will have to find it in a stream of images,
this means watching the whole video in at least a scanning fashion.
You'll need more than one image, so you will have to pull out each
one. In an hours video, how much time do you think you have just
spent? You've just added several hours on top of the viewing time
itself. If you are using the type of software that can produce a
higher quality image from several video frames, being conservative,
for 200 images you have just added another six hours to you post
capture processing time (that's with an established workflow). You've
just added a minimum of 10 hours to your workload, assuming an
optimized workflow, to get to the point a still photographer will
start with as raw input to their workflow. It actually can get worse
from here because you will have a lot more post processing in
something like photoshop to get even close to the default quality that
a still photographer will start with simply as a matter of knowing how
to get as much right in the capture as they can for any given image.

In terms of quality and ecomomics alone, I just don't see it on the
still side. Now, you have the job of editing the video and producing
a quality package out of that. The analysis could continue, but you
would be in the situation of trying to compete with either a pro
covering a wedding in video and who has hired a still photographer, or
the converse. Either way, they will be able to produce a higher
quality package technically and aesthetically at a similar, or lower
price, than you can and at a better profit margin for them.

You aren't the first to think of this and there are very good reasons
that pros, either from the videography or photography side, haven't
jumped on the idea.

Vance
.

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