5fps DSLR movie

Daydream from Martin Koch on Vimeo.

The scenes at the beginning and at the end are shot with a Nikon DSLR with about 5 frames per second. The JPEG quality was set to S (2128 x 1416 pixels) and FINE. The playback speed is 24 fps and in order to get the 5fps look almost "real time" I asked my son to move extra slow.

The frames look just great since the image processors in todays DSLRs are able to proper downscale and compress 5 to 8 images per second. Of course life of the physical shutter is limited and I don't want to do this regularly. It was an interesting experiment though and it proves that Photo-JPEG compressed video can look excellent.

Each frame weighs 1.3 MB so that would be about 30 MB/s @ 24fps (if a camera with 24 fps electronic shutter would exist). A 32 GB CF card could hold about 17 minutes of very high quality "video".

Using the frames in After Effects is easy. First put each scene into an individual folder (This is something a future camera should do automatically). Then import each scene by clicking on the first image in a folder. After Effects automatically checks Image sequence and imports it as such. Right-click on the imported footage and use "Interprete Footage Main" to set a frame rate you want. Thats all you need to use the footage in a comp where you can downscale and crop to your liking.