I’m afraid I’m still stuck at the “find a suitable camera” step, regardless of funding.
I stumbled upon this nice trick to capture frames at 660fps using a raspberry pi camera (it does not get cheaper than this), but resolution is 640x64, I doubt we would see 0.001" thick chips forming 
If someone knows of a camera that
- can grab high-res frames at 500+ fps
- has a reasonably standard interface (USB3.0 maybe?)
- has macro focusing capability
I would sure like to hear about it, just to know what the pros use. But then I would probably manage to drive an endmill into it 
EDIT, yeah, more like 5000 fps.