High-speed camera

A high-speed camera is a device capable of image exposures in excess of 1/1,000 or frame rates in excess of 250 frames per second. It is used for recording fast-moving objects as a photographic image(s) onto a storage medium. After recording, the images stored on the medium can be played back in slow-motion. Early high-speed cameras used film to record the high-speed events, but today high-speed cameras are entirely electronic using either a charge-coupled device (CCD) or a CMOS active pixel sensor, recording typically over 1,000 frames per second into DRAM and playing images back slowly to study the motion for scientific study of transient phenomena. A high-speed camera can be classified as:

A normal motion picture film is played back at 24 frames per second, while television uses 25 frames/s (PAL) or 29.97 frames/s (NTSC). High-speed film cameras can film up to a quarter of a million frames per second by running the film over a rotating prism or mirror instead of using a shutter, thus reducing the need for stopping and starting the film behind a shutter which would tear the film stock at such speeds. Using this technique one can stretch one second to more than ten minutes of playback time (super slow motion). High-speed video cameras are widely used for scientific research, military test and evaluation, and industry. Examples of industrial applications are filming a manufacturing line to better tune the machine, or in the car industry the crash testing to better document the crash and what happens to the automobile and passengers during a crash. Today, the digital high-speed camera has replaced the film camera used for Vehicle Impact Testing.

Television series such as MythBusters and Time Warp often use high-speed cameras to show their tests in slow motion. Saving the recorded high-speed images can be time consuming because the newest consumer cameras today have resolutions up to four megapixels at record rates over 1000 frames per second, which means in one second the user will have over 11 gigabytes of image data. Technologically these cameras are very advanced, yet saving images requires use of slower standard video-computer interfaces. While recording is very fast, saving images is considerably slower. One of the solutions to drive down the recorded data, or to minimize the required time to look at the images, is to pre-select only the parts which are interesting enough to film. During industrial breakdown analysis, cyclical filming focuses only on that part of the cycle which is interesting.

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