What's happening when you use your editing software to slow down your recorded image is that you are destroying the "persistance of vision" trick that your eye does to your brain to convince it that this series of still images is really one continuous moving image. Couple that with the fact that these moving images (individually) are not altogether that crisp (they tend to be blurry, which helps with the persistance of vision thing), and your eye starts to see them for what they are: a slide show of bad still shots.

I'm primarily a film guy, so please forgive me if I've not kept up with the latest in video, but I doubt that you will find a camera (yet) that will do what you want for a price you can afford. I say this with some confidence knowing that this hi speed stuff is one of the big obstacles in switching from film to digital in the motion picture world. I'm sure it's not far away, but we're just getting some hi speed digital stuff now, and for Hollywood, money is not usually an issue.

To record slow motion, you have to shoot at a faster frame rate, so that when you play back the clip in real time, it takes longer to play. For instance, a piece of action that takes one second in real time, recorded at 29.97fps (normal video speed) plays back in one second. But if you speed up the fps to twice that, (approx. 60fps), the same piece of action takes 2 seconds of screen time. This means you have to capture images twice as fast. Since most consumer cameras are as good as they can be for the prices they are sold and profit margins are slim, consider what the designers would have to do.

The brains of the camera have to be beefed up to capture twice as many images as before. The guts of the camera have to be improved to be able to move the tape at a greater rate of speed without stretching or breaking it. The tape itself probably has to be improved to keep from being stretched or broken. All of this drives up price and weight, two main considerations most consumers have when buying video cameras. I did a quick search and found nothing affordable that does what you want. Even "in-betweening" software such as that used on Matrix is big time expensive.

I ventured way out on a limb to answer this question, (considering my knowledge base), so let's see if I can't go just a little further without hanging myself (we're looking for help from the peanut gallery here, not jeers). With NTSC, there are 2 fields recorded for every frame (2 lower resolution pictures which lay on top of each other to create a fully resolved image). Since these fields are captured at different times, it might be possible to call each of these fields a frame. If that's the case, then your camera is already recording in high speed. The images will not be as good as other images in your cut, but might be good enough. The biggest problem will be finding a way to make your software recognize the fields as frames. Then again, your biggest problem might be paying any attention to the last paragraph of this post at all. I might be totally talking out of my butt.

Good luck. Hopefully I'm not giving you a bum steer.

thanks focuspuller i apreciate the time u spent looking into that for me ......?:)?

To obtain a birds eye is to turn a blizzard into a breeze :)> ? B