High Speed camera fun

This page contains assorted images from my high-speed camera system. new stuff will be added at the top of the page.
More high-speed images here

If you have trouble viewing these, I'm sorry but I probably can't help - they play fine in my Windoze Media Player & Real Player....!
However if you are an expert on this sort of stuff and have any constructive suggestions on better ways to produce movies for efficient web download (ideally without spending any money), I'd appreciate any input, particularly anything that works efficiently with monochrome images. I have uncompressed AVI versions of these files, so I can easily recompress with different codecs if this would be worthwhile.

I highly reccommend virtualdub as a good means of viewing AVIs frame-by-frame.

If you have any suggestions of things that might be interesting to record, please email me.

Can crushed by atmospheric pressure (water boiled in can, then dumped upside down in water - steam condenses, forming vacuum in can). cancrush.avi   (727K)    Youtube

CD snapped by hand cdbreak.avi (87K)

25 May 2008 - Derby Teslathon

Derek Woodroffe's tesla coil, recorded at 2000 frames/second coil_vert.avi (363KB). Youtube

Large Jacob's Ladder at 1000 frames/sec jacob_crop.avi (754K)

9 Apr 2006  The obligatory water droplets etc.

These were the first sequencences taken with my "Untensified" imager, giving much better image quality.

Water drops, with mid-air collisions. 1000 frames/sec AVI (2.6MB)

Another good mid-air collision  AVI (330K)

Drop of milk - showing that most of the first 'bounce' droplet contains the original liquid. 1000 frames/sec  AVI (316K)

Nottingham Gaussfest 11 March 2006

This was the first time my high-speed camera system was used 'in anger', having hastily bodged together the software to transfer images out of it to the PC just the evening before the event, with no time to test it properly. The greyscale on these images is probably not ideal due to total lack of gamma correction, and some further experiments with lighting will be needed to get better image quality - most of these were done with the image intensifier gain cranked up to eleven, and are rather noisy as a result.

Unfortunately a few good sequences were lost due to the flakiness of the hastily hacked software, but some good stuff was still obtained, mostly involving breaking things using aluminium hard-disc platters propelled at great speed using the destruct-o-tron

The enevitable CD smashage

Well the first thing just had to be smashing a CD, didn't it....? Hard disk platter sits on coil, with CD above it. You can see that the CD smashes from the acceleration, not the impact with the top of the containment tube.

1000 frames/second. Video : AVI (Windows Media 9 Codec) 379K   Real Media (200K)

Hard-disc platter versus beer glass.

It took 3 attempts to actually break the glass, but we goth teher in the end...
Unfortunately the coil flashed over during this sequence, but you can still see how the disc appears to wrap itself round the glass before the glass finally gives way...

1000 frames/second. Video : AVI (Windows Media 9 Codec) 1052K       Real Media low-res (224K) 

Coin dropped into glass of water

1000 frames/sec. Video: Windows Media 9 AVI  (457K)

Tinfoil dish fountain

This footage shows a fun trick that can be done with a large van de Graff machine or, as in this case, a Cockroft-Walton multiplier (Derek Woodroffe's) .
A pile of aluminium foil pie-dishes is placed on the  topload, and charged to around 200KV. The electrostatic force causes a 'fountain' effect as each dish is in turn repelled from the one below.
Although we did get a recoring of the complete sequence, part of it unfortunately fell victim to the flaky data transfer software. I've shortened it further to save space.
This sequence shows quite a lot of 100Hz flicker, as some of the light was coming from overhead fluorescent lighting.

1000 frames/sec. Video :  Windows Media 9 AVI (1726K)   Real Media (1100K)

Water-filled balloon

You can see the ballon 'unwrap', leaving  a lump of water hanging in the air, which then drops.

1000 frames/sec Windows Media 9 AVI (641K)