Slow/Ultra Slow Motion and Thread...

AlephZero

No, of course I'm not questioning the speed of those videos. But if you look at the camera spec here http://www.engadget.com/2005/03/29/s...d-video-camera it has a resolution of 312 x 260 pixels and captures a maximum of 100 frames.

That is no use for what we need, because for want to accurately measure things that are smaller than 1/1000th of the size of the image, and we need thousands of consecutive frames not 100. He is taking a closeup of a bullet. We are taking pictures of a 10-foot-diameter jet engine but we still want to be able to see what happens to bullet-sized things (or even smaller) in the video.

As with any design there will be a tradeoff between speed and the other capabilities of the camera. I expect if we paid somebody serious money they could design a digital camera to meet our requirements, but so far as I know there is nothing on the market already.

Apart from the photography, just the data collection would be a major problem. Assuming the 1MFPS camera is 8-bit monochrome (the youtube videos aren't in color) they are collecting about 8 MBytes of data in 0.1 milliseconds. It's feasible to store that in computer RAM, and then save it to disk at a slower rate. But we would need to collect at least 60 Gbytes (and ideally several times that amount) in 0.2 sec. That's a completely different scale of problem - we are talking about fillling up the complete hard disk on a typical PC with data in a fraction of a second.