Time Within the Images

SciCast film goes here

If you're reading this text, try visiting http://scicast.org.uk/films/2008/02/time-within-the-images.html directly. If you're already there you probably need to update Flash

← Previous Film / Next Film →
  • Currently 0/5
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
(votes cast: 0)
entrant08
License: Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share-Alike Time Within the Images MVP & The Martians
Views: 4205
06 Feb, 2008

Duration: 01:48
Team: MVP & The Martians
Region: West Midlands

DownloadDownload film (right-click)
Categories:
Explanation , Physics , Secondary

A variety of vehicles are captured on film — frame-by-frame analysis will reveal their speeds.

Director's Notes:

You just need a camera on a tripod, metre rules, a road close to school for filming traffic, and basic editing software.

Part of a set of three films showing different ways of measuring vehicle speed:

  1. The Human Ruler
  2. Time Within the Images
  3. Professor Light Gate

SciCast Notes:

Now this is clever — using the video camera itself as an instrument to measure vehicle speed. This sort of thing is done frequently in sports science, and I’ve seen some amazing demonstrations of the Dartfish software.

One warning: make sure you know how many frames per second your camera is recording. Conventional PAL video from a European miniDV camera is 25 frames/sec; American-standard NTSC video is 29.97 frames/sec; things like mobile phones or webcams often run at 30 frames/sec; and some cameras can indeed be set to 24 frames/sec. Obvisouly, it makes a difference to the maths!

— Jonathan