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Video
Science + Tech

Gimme Mo' Slow Mo'

VIDEO: The strange beauty caught by today's very, very slow-motion cameras.

Allison Martell 14 May 2008TheTyee.ca

Allison Martell is a Toronto-based writer. She never used to watch television, but has been ruined by wireless broadband.
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New technology, old fascination.

By rights, if you slow everyday events way down, the results should be incredibly boring. So it's surprising that slow-motion videos are anything but -- thanks to the current slow-mo technology renaissance. In recent weeks, I've been totally captivated by this water balloon exploding.

But although this clip has been making waves on the Viral Video Chart, it's not the best example of high-speed photography on YouTube. This older version improves on the water balloon concept by showing it even slower, and from several angles.

As a nerdy child watching nature documentaries, I thought time-lapse photography was the coolest thing you could do with a video camera. Turns out, I'm way out of date: ultra high-speed photography, which creates video that can be shown at very slow speeds with no reduction in quality, is the new way to twist open reality. The images captured at high frame-rates are strange, beautiful, often mesmerizing.

There's no end to what you can watch slowed down. Balloons are overrepresented on YouTube, as are bullets, but you can also watch a single kernel of popcorn blooming into a crunchy snack, a man blowing a raspberry, and a bouncing rubber ball.

As with so many things, the current slow-mo explosion is thanks to new technology. A brand new generation of ultra high-speed digital video cameras is capturing video at up to one million frames per second. And these new cameras have prompted something of an advertising fad, especially in spots for cosmetics or beverages. And maybe these B.C. lottery videos?

And it has a scientific application too -- scientists use it to observe phenomena that happen too quickly for us to perceive normally. This clip from Time Warp, a new Discovery Channel show, helps us see the damage that boxing does to the body and brain. In fact, boxing inflicts injuries that make everything seem like it's in slow mo -- without the technology.

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