Want to see how cameras automatically adjust shutter speed to compensate for changing light conditions? A simple experiment with a ruler can help you visualize it in an interesting and unusual way.
YouTuber Chris Chris captured the above video showing what happens when your camera's frame rate is perfectly synced to the rotation speed of a helicopter's rotor: the blades are frozen at the same angles in each frame, making it look like the helicopter is magically floating around with frozen rotor blades.
Canon's DSLRs come with a variety of continuous shooting speeds, ranging from 2.5 frames per second on the 300D (AKA Digital Rebel/Kiss Digital) to a whopping 14 frames per second on the high-end 1D-X. If you want to get a taste of what these shutter speeds sound like on the actual cameras, check out the comparison video above by YouTube user dochero2005.
Earlier this year, we shared a crazy example of how you can make water drops look like they're frozen in midair simply by passing the water over a speaker and using sound vibrations to sync the drops with the frame rate of your camera. Well, Japan's largest music channel, Space Shower TV, has taken the idea and turned it into clever commercial. What you see above is ordinary footage using this trick -- there's no fancy CGI trickery, reversal during post, or high-speed camera footage involved.
Here's an old-ish video that's been making the rounds again lately (viral videos are like viruses -- they don't go away very easily). Titled "Camera shutter speed synchronized with helicopter blade frequency," it shows what can happen when your camera is synchronized with the RPM of a helicopter's rotor blades. The resulting footage makes the helicopter look as though it's just floating in the air!
A couple weeks ago we shared an interesting video in which a speaker and Canon 5D Mark …
When recording video, a camera’s frame rate can produce some pretty strange effects. If matched up with a helicopter’s …
Canon’s new 1D X DSLR shoots at a whopping 14 frames per second, but did …
Here’s another beautiful example of what Twixtor, the $300 frame-rate conversion …
If you don't have the $2,500 needed to rent a Phantom camera for a day but would like to have super slow motion in your videos, you can fake the effect using special software designed for the task. The above video by Oton Bačar was recorded on a Canon 7D at 60 frames per second, but was slowed down to mimic 1000fps in After Effects with Twixtor, a plugin that allows you to speed up or slow down footage smoothly. It uses warping and interpolation to provide smooth results, avoiding the choppiness that you see when you play normal video back in "slow motion".