Like other great powers, the power of high-speed cameras can be used for good or it can be used for fun. A lot of feature films use slow motion more than they should like the latest Resident Evil movie. Some programs on tv such as Mythbusters and Time Warp on the Discovery channel use high-speed cameras during their playtime I mean scientific experiments. Using High-speed cameras the Mythbusters can watch their myths unfold in front of them in slow motion to see what went wrong or what went right to try to doing it again and get the same or better result. On Youtube there is a group of British young adults who work with high-speed cameras in their career so sometimes they borrow the high-speed cameras and have a little fun with it such as exploding giant water balloons or shooting fireworks at their own cars, they call themselves the Slow-Mo Guys and are quite popular, bring their own kind of Time Warp to Youtube.
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For everyone who laughs at smart cars because they are so small and looks like a child’s car, thanks to high-speed cameras, we can see that a smart car thanks to its frame and size it is actually incredibly safe. I found a video slowing down a collision of a smart car going 75 mph in to a solid cement wall. With it crawling along the screen we are able to see how the impact causes the car to crumble and contract but still holds its frame even to the point where you can still open and shut the doors. With high-speed cameras car companies can do this with their cars to test how safe they are, with the world we live in they could never let a car out in the world without testing every safely feature of their cars. So what better way to test it then smash it a couple hundred times and watch it in sloooooooooow mo? 
Image via Wikipedia
Looking into the many uses of high-speed cameras I found a lot of food companies that use high-speed cameras on the assembly line. A company called 20/20 Hindsight provides food company such as Heinz , Smuckers and Campbells. Companies use high-speed cameras to slow down the packaging process to make sure everything is running smoothly, to show new employes the process and how things work, improve on product quality and to solve problems and find out why something broke or continues to break. If a jar breaks on Smucker’s conveyor belt, they have the ability to review the cameras while they continue to record and watch the break frame by frame to discover what happen and judge whether they need to take further action. Using high-speed cameras causes production value and efficiency to increase.
The Phantom Flex has been titled The World’s most flexible digital cinema camera. The phantom Flex camera is a very nice and professional camera, this camera can shoot from 5 fps to 10,750 fps. The faster you set the camera the more you lose in image quality, so you sacrifice quality for quantity. This camera has two main features, a standard mode that works like any other kind of high-speed camera and a Phantom HQ Mode, in HQ mode it captures a lot more information than standard mode but can only shoot half the speed. Below is a link for an ad for the Phantom Flex camera
Even though the camera is called high-speed, we use it to slow down time to a fraction, it’s almost like a play on words. We call it high-speed because its take pictures of your movements at an extremely high rate. So lets say you record yourself walking for a minute while using a camera that shots at 2500 fps. If you do the quick math, you’ll have 150,000 Frames so if you needed to or wanted to slow it down you’ll have a more fluid motion while being able to see all of the movement of you walking. If you use a regular camera that shot 24 fps. and did the same thing you’ll have 1440 Frames, nowhere near the same amount as the high-speed camera, so if you slowed it down you’ll get a much more choppy movement and missing some parts of your walk because it didn’t capture as much. The best way to show the example of what high-speed cameras can do is with this video. In this video they are using a camera called Phantom Flex that can shoot 5000 fps. Which is 200 times slower than real-time. Watch it and at the end they drop a little knowledge on you that is pretty cool.
“I must govern the clock, not be governed by it. ”
Golda Meir
For centuries we have always tried to capture a moment of time. Now in the 21st century we have high-speed cameras that can shoot 5000 frames per second when movies are usually shot in 24 frames per second at the most. I’m here to talk about the functions of high-speed cameras and the many different uses for them, from education to just for fun.
Slowing Down Time 