We know it seems like a bit of a misnomer, but when people say they want to film something in slow-motion, what they really mean is they want to use a camera capable of high-speed photography.
Video is just a series of photographs shown one after the other at a frequency that looks normal to the human eye. The sweet spot for this is 30 FPS, or 30 frames per second. Most video will be presented to you around 30 FPS, and video games are usually 60 FPS. So a video that runs at 30 FPS is showing you 30 separate images every second. As FPS gets higher, so does file size, but it also allows you to slow the video down and see things in slow motion. Also as your FPS goes up, the resolution of your video will go down.
Just to give some perspective:
- 500 FPS is 20 times slower than real-time
- 1000 FPS is 40 times slower
- 2500 FPS is 100 times slower
- 5000 FPS is 200 times slower AND
- 10,000 FPS is 400 times slower than real-time
We have one camera in our line-up that has High-Speed capabilities: Casio Exilim EX-F1.
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