Slow Motion

What is Slow Motion?

Slow Motion is an effect in which time appears to be slowed down. Human eye is said to be capable of processing 10-12 separate images per second and as per Edison 46 FPS is minimum -"anything less will strain the human eye". The handy cams we use at home have a frame rate of around 50-60 whereas FPS of cameras used by professionals may go upto 10,000. Technically, you can make any video very slow by using video editing softwares but the problem comes with the FPS (frames per second). As you can figure out from the name- FPS, it is the number of frames or pictures taken by a video camera in 1 second. Having more number of FPS does not mean that the video will appear much slower. Lets take an example- suppose you have two videos, one shot using an ordinary video camera and the other using a camera which can take a large number, say 1000 frames per second. Now, using a video editing software, you make both the videos 100x slower than actual time, the video taken with the 1000 FPS camera will be extremely smooth showing even the fine details of the activity captured. For the ordinary camera, on the other hand, the slow motion will appear like a slideshow of pictures.

With What?

Sony Phantom Flex

For making any slow motion video, you need to have a high-speed camera. I know its very ironical to say high-speed cameras when you are dealing with slow motion but the name 'high-speed' comes from the large number of frames that it is taking in 1 second. The best in the business is the Sony Phantom Flex High Speed Camera. It can take up to stunning 2,000 FPS in HD and up to 10,000 FPS in 167x250.

Problems

The first problem comes with your budget. The Sony Phantom Flex mentioned above costs a handsome $150,000, in place of which you can buy a pretty fancy Mercedes-SUV. The second problem is a technical one, every single second of video taken from your high-speed camera shooting at HD will eat up 8 Gigabytes(GB) of your hard disk. It makes a lot of sense though, imagine your  high speed camera shooting at HD up to 2,000 FPS, so it will take 2,000 HD pictures in 1 second and that's what accounts for the 8 Gigabytes.

The Best 

The Slomoguys on Youtube are very popular in making slow motion videos.They also make advertisements and that's how they get their budget for their experiments and equipments. Slow motion is a tool to observe the nature more precisely and to know about things which our eye can not perceive in real time.