Alright, I've heard of people using an array or traditional cameras (30fps) together to create a High Speed Shot of a target. 10 cameras, at 30FPS timed correctly would yield about 300 fps.
I got a bright idea. I want to see light leave a laser pointer for a distance of about 1 meter. Light travels at slightly below 300 Million meters a second, so for us to observe a 1 meter length, we would need to have a camera that could record some frames at 1/300,000,000 of a second, so 1 frame would need to be 1/600,000,000 for 2 frames of light movement, but I am looking for about 20-30 frames, maybe even 60-80.
Is it possible? With a lot of money, time, and a huge computer system, YES, it is.
Recently a camera producer has a camera that can record one frame every 5 nano seconds (ns for short), that would be about 200,000,000 frames a second. With that camera, assuming you could get 300,000,000 metres in a frame, you could see light travel the entire distance as if it was a car, assuming that it could record a long amount of time.
Most of the cameras can only record a few hundred frames at such a high framerate, but that is okay, we want no more than 100 frames, and we would be using multiple cameras.
If you have an array of 5 cameras, each one starting 1 ns apart in theory, we would get a frame every ns, which would be 1,000,000,000 frames per second, if I did the quick math in my head right. At that speed, we should be able to see light travel 1 meter of distance, and actually see it move from point to point, and see exactly how light travels. Now the problems:
The cameras that record at 200,000,000 frames per second have such a quick "shutter" Tons of light is needed to record something at this speed for normal visibility, I have no clue what infrared or the other recording modes need to record.
Another problem is that each camera is actually a whole package, camera, computer, etc... that has basically 16 cameras that record in an array, just like the array we are wanting to set up. So basically an array of cameras, which each have 16 arrays inside, all controlled by one master computer.
If this could be achieved, the way we see light could be changed forever.
If only I had a few million dollars, and a team of experts to develop the software/hardware for this type of procedure, and I would have a pretty slow motion video. If all else fails I would have a really awesome High Speed rig, and could do some great special effects at a lower FPS.
