Slower is clearer, Belgian camera firm to show

CEO flying here with cricket and Bollywood in mind.

In an increasingly fast-moving world, one company in this southern Belgian city makes its living by making things slower.

I-Movix is the maker of the world’s slowest camera, the SprintCam, capable of shooting and instantly replaying between 25 and 10,000 frames per second, more than 400 times slower than what is now normal speed.

And, with Delhi set to host the Commonwealth Games in October, I-Movix has its lens firmly trained on India. 

“Our cameras can capture the intensity of sport like nothing else. The facial expressions of the athletes, the cheering of the crowds. It’s amazing to watch,” says Laurent Renard, the CEO.

The SprintCam is already widely used at international sporting events. It was also used at the Beijing Olympiad in 2008. From Brazil’s TV Globo to Sky Sports and France’s Canal Plus, this camera has emerged as the preferred choice for many broadcasters, although it costs 20-30 per cent more than a standard broadcast camera.

Renard will be in India at the end of the month as part of a 300-plus Belgian economic mission. In the run up to the visit, he’s taken to studying what for him is a brand new sport — cricket.

“Cricket has caught our attention. We are interested in positioning our camera as the one best for broadcasting it,” explains Renard. He says that old-fashioned infra-red cameras are still commonly used in the televising of cricket.

“This is a very old technology. The frame-by-frame slow motion you see from it gives a jerky image. With the SprintCam, things will change dramatically. You will see the ball hit the wicket and the bails flying off with a precision that will enhance the whole experience.”

Renard earlier visited India in 2008 to try and get a sense of the market for the SprintCam and says he was pleasantly surprised. “We were mostly thinking of the sports market but we also found considerable interest from Bollywood,” the CEO smiles.

“Both the stunts in action movies and the song and dance sequences can be emphasised with our camera,” he explains. 

And, since the proof is in the pudding or in this case, in the watching, he gives us a demonstration.

We are shown a slow-motion recording of an I-Movix colleague dancing, a belt of bells attached to her waste. At 1,000 frames per second, it is an extraordinary scene to behold, the bells swinging in a slow, curvaceous arc, in the opposite direction to the sinuous twist of the dancer’s hips. Manna for Bollywood.