Thermal imaging in mainstream media

[Ultrapurple]

How often does thermal imaging come up in mainstream media?

I found myself wondering this today as BBC News 24 (UK) ran a short feature about improving the insulation of the nation's housing stock. The thermal image used was a pan across an anonymous - though probably well-heeled - row of houses. I've attached a still from part of the pan, which I screen-grabbed from a stream I was watching on a spare monitor attached to the work PC. The stream was only relatively low resolution (~VGA) but the thermal image looked quite good - I'm guessing it was roughly 640x480 class.

There must be lots of occasions when thermal imaging gets a mention but we have no feeling for how often it occurs. So here's a challenge: if you happen to see some mainstream media, take a photo or screendump or whatever and post it here, clearly labelled with the source, eg

Source: BBC TV
Media: TV (24h news stream channel BBC News 24)
Date (ISO¹ format): 2020-07-07
Local time (if relevant): 12:10pm


¹ISO 8601 date format: yyyy-mm-dd


Please add to the list as you come across stuff. NB: for the purposes of this page, please exclude things like advertising, social media, YouTube, press releases and so on and stick to editorial content.

[agh768]

BBC has the watches series  Springwatch, Autumnwatch and Winterwatch.

they have used super tele infrared equipment on those shoots quite often also as live cameras.

also for various bbc documentatries ir cams have been used. some really high resolution ones

[Hydron]

How about hotspot in cricket? From wikipedia (and just looking at the images on TV) it looks like they use MWIR cooled cameras at a fairly high frame rate - must be a pain for them to deal with export licensing, possibly why they don't get used as much any more or in some of the more difficult locations (cricket is popular in some fairly diverse regions!)

Also not exactly "media", but the film Sicario has a sequence near the end with a MWIR camera - I could tell when watching that it wasn't an uncooled LWIR camera by the depth of field. Looking it up later it seems they used a FLIR HD scientific cooled MWIR unit (can't remember exactly which) - certainly not something man-worn as suggested in the film!

[Vipitis]

FLIR and Sicario (2) SAFIRE 380: https://youtu.be/w0xUnxbvurg, Sicario (1) SC8300: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3397884/trivia?item=tr3781752 and more: https://www.flir.com/news-center/corporate-news/top-5-flir-moments-in-film-television/

Cricket used Leonardo MWIR: check the "Major sporting event" application in this brochure: https://www.leonardocompany.com/en/products/slx-hawk-1 also this archived press release: https://web.archive.org/web/20121030175830/http://www.soldiermod.com/pdfs/press-releases/2012-06-11-selex.pdf

[Jenny]

Why no one mentioned wildlife footages? They have the most insane picture quality I’ve ever seen for a thermal camera. Just some examples:


Seems they are all long range MWIR cameras, or even high end in that category? Not only the resolution, but also the really natural looking, making my device just like a toy. 

[Vipitis]

the first one says it in the video right there. That is an Selex Hawk pretty much the cricket thing.

For the Thermoteknix samples it is a little more difficult. those are not cooled WMIR cameras. In fact here is the whole episode where some of those shots seem to originate from: https://curiositystream.com/video/1857/survivors timestamp 20:00 for the first thermal shot. But I am not sure about the cameras used. First party says it was MIRICLE 307K cores (25µm pixels) while there is also a video and a product that got released and is still linked, but now no longer exists. archived.

[David Hess]

At some point I worry that public availability will undo the US Supreme Court decision Kyllo v. United States where a thermal infrared scan is considered a search for purposes of requiring a warrant.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyllo_v._United_States

The dissent thought this line was "unnecessary, unwise, and inconsistent with the Fourth Amendment"[4] because according to Scalia's previous logic, this firm but bright line would be defunct as soon as the surveillance technology used went into general public use, which was still undefined.

[Lambda]

Hello.

Sorry, i dig perhaps a bit deep in the past here...  But perhaps you would find interesting this video made by a french amateur astronome, Thierry Midavaine, whom has also a good experience in image intensifier used in astronomy.

Here is a recent moon eclipse having been observed through a LWIR camera coupled to a telescope, showing the cooling down of the moon's surface during the eclipse.

https://fr-fr.facebook.com/cieletespace/videos/la-lune-en-infrarouge-film%C3%A9e-par-thierry-midavaine/10156244091440346/

And a power point presentation for going more in detail about this experiment (Setup.. some theory....).

https://media.afastronomie.fr/RCE/PresentationsRCE2018/Midavaine-RCE2018.pdf

Enjoy!

Best regards.

Stéphane

[Ultrapurple]

Thanks Lambda - the information you linked is fascinating and the images go a long way towards making up for anyone's lack of French!

[DaJMasta]

The Berlin Philharmonic used some thermal pictures of instruments as part of their promotional material for this season's preview (2020/2021), some stills in their promotional video as well as in their season brochure.

https://www.berliner-philharmoniker.de/en/season-preview/

[Ultrapurple]

Great spot!

I couldn't work out what camera they'd used but I'm impressed that they thought the image was good enough to use as a double page spread.

[Dark Volter]

There is the very well put together case of the Route 94 My Love Music Video  (which is my absolute FAVORITE- )

NOTE: It's a bit Risque in a scene or two, though not fully NSFW.





There's been a few blogs(sadly they are not all still up, wayback machine to the rescue ) on how this was done- and I have seen the Director Ryan Staake comment on this occasionally on reddit...

https://web.archive.org/web/20160814073447/https://irvingharvey.com/2014/02/12/metering-with-heat-shooting-route-94-my-love-with-a-thermal-camera/

https://medium.com/@irvingharvey/metering-with-heat-shooting-route-94-my-love-with-a-thermal-camera-22102cc3cd7c

https://vimeo.com/blog/post/creator-q-a-heat-things-up-with-a-thermal-camera/
/
(sidenote: They rented the FLIR SC8200 for this, which is amazing to see , since they decid ed to use a heavy duty camera and not a FLIR one. I wish we  saw this sort of thing more often, but I know they aren't cheap even  to rent, [I know on the web i've seen people say the price of a SC8300  for example is $100k )

  I also  really wish we had more music videos with this heavy  usage.....)

I also know thermals have popped up a few times in other music videos, like the ones mentioned here
https://thermalimaging-blog.com/173-some-examples-of-thermal-camera-usage-in-music-videos/, and a few others (Glass Animal's Your Love [Deja Vu] comes to recent mind. )

[CatalinaWOW]

I don't have any current grabbed imagery, but nearly daily during fire season in the western US you see thermal imagery.  Two general categories, space based imagery and various short range types, aerial drones and hand held at ground level.  The space based stuff uses MODIS and VIIRS data, heavily processed before presentation, and has something like 0.5 km resolution on the ground.  The short range stuff is virtually 100% microbolometer LWIR imagery of moderate resolution, appears to be in the neighborhood of 120X160.  I have used both to gauge the danger to my home when fires approached to a kilometer or so.

[Vipitis]

I am impressed by all those submissions, the moon stuff is fantastic - but I guess I have always missed it by not looking for it in French...

the brochure is a surprise and I have asked them to send me a copy. I could use some reference and figure out more about the artist.

there is yet another music video, which will be added to the playlist.

you can expect me to write about most of these things (I got a few more leads for thermal imaging in advertisement - which can be art) in the near future. But for then next two weeks I gotta focus on exams and I shouldn't spent hours googling this stuff.

[svgurus]

about Berlin philarmonie:
https://www.ifam.fraunhofer.de/de/Presse/Fraunhofer-Forscher_machen_musikalische_Energie_der_Berliner_Philharmoniker_sichtbar.html
https://www.ifam.fraunhofer.de/content/dam/ifam/de/documents/dd/Pressemitteilungen/Presseinformation_Fraunhofer-Forscher%20machen%20musikalische%20Energie%20der%20Berliner%20Philharmoniker%20sichtbar_Fraunhofer%20IFAM%20Dresden.pdf
Bilder: Heribert Schindler in Zusammenarbeit mit dem Fraunhofer IFAM Dresden
Looks like he is a conventional wavelength photographer who has been working with concert hall before https://www.heribertschindler.de/berlin-philharmonie#0 and this time he was helped by this institute)  About the camera - it is something really odd, with twisting eyepiece on a handle) But as we can see by examples of Vipitis and some other famous here guy, selling flir tau on ebay with a screen made from miniDV camera, Germans are fine too with making cameras from salvaged components) so maybe its some VGA resolution core in old camera case

[Bud]

Wikileaks spying on spies 
Near infrared footage of Julian Assange "grab team" outside of the Equadorian embassy embassy in London

https://archive.org/details/assange-grabteam-K6-20171224002600_20171224003000-competition1

Stunning resolution, but Wikileaks wanted more, to read what was on the papers they were holding 

[publioelon]

That Fast and Furious movie with The Rock and Jason Statham at some point the characters use a FLIR camera to inspect a door lock

[Bill W]

Quite a bit of high(er) definition IR on BBC Springwatch at present - goes on for 3 weeks MON-THU 2000 UK only 5 programmes so finished now

Not sure how well you can get it off satellite across Europe, or how the iPlayer option geoblocking affects it.
The live cameras online are only IR, not thermal.

Final programme (29 Oct) had 3 thermal sections in it, at 1, 23 and 45 minutes approximately mostly deer, owls and bats.  Images did look a bit like some posted above suggesting a fair degree of upsampling and filtering.


Bill

[DaneLaw]

A minor bump to Ultrapurple's thermal media thread..who sadly ain't here anymore to spoil us all with his stunning thermal imaging.

Some thermal shots from today early morning from danish defence force "Forsvaret" after numerous bombings/sabotage in danish waters on Nord Stream2 and Nord Stream1, though not gas-pipelines that supply Denmark as per se, mostly Germany.
Still not clear if it's submarine-guided attacks, but without a doubt intended bombing attacks, that caused numerous breaches that will take quite a while to fix.
It measured 2.3  and 2.1 on the Richter scale, to put it into perspective - biggest bombs under WW2 clocked in at 2.5 on the Richter scale.. so quite potent bombs - that were used and caused the breach.

Massive gas-spil outside danish Bornholm.

     

https://twitter.com/i/status/1574739041504870400