DIY High Speed Video Camera - Muybridge Style - Smarter Every Day 5

[Music] Hey, it's me, Destin. The idea, here at Smarter Every Day, is to make you smarter. I guess it was 1872, the governor of California tried to solve the age-old question: When a horse runs, are all four of its hooves off the ground at any point in transit? Now, artists of the day liked to show images with the horses' feet up front and in back off the ground. So he commissioned a guy named Eadweard Muybridge to create a series of images while the horse was running.

Now, Muybridge was pretty sharp, so what he did is he strung some strings out and had a man ride the horse through the series of strings, and each string was associated with a camera. Basically, it was a time-of-arrival switch. So, this was pretty interesting. Now this is a pulse generator, given to me by a company in Montana called Quantum Composers. It is amazing. It is a time machine without the flux capacitor, basically. Time for science.

What we're gonna do is we've got a piezoelectric transducer rigged up to this thing on the trigger input. All you have to do is just trigger the thing acoustically and it flashes. And this is programmable down to the 25 picosecond resolution. Here's a 1.8 second flash after... [snaps fingers] the sound. So, it's pretty awesome. Anyway... So what we're gonna do is to create a series of high-speed photography images and put them together in a video, just like Muybridge did back in the day. So, let's do it.

Weapons are not toys. What you're about to see was done by educated, experienced personnel in a controlled environment. Be smart. Let's load. Muybridge bullet, take one. Here we go. [Gunshot] [Pulse generator beeping] [Gunshot] [Pulse generator beeping] This is what the video looks like straight up, just as shot. And this is what the video looks like once I correct for the ballistic variance and go in there and, uh... put them in order, in distance. So, pretty cool.

Okay, so some of you are thinking, "that's awesome! No clue what it means." So let me explain. Commercial high-speed cameras are very expensive, but what we've done for repetitive events, we've created one at a fraction of the cost, and at 7 times the resolution of 1080p. So like Muybridge, we've combined simpler technologies to create something that was technologically out of our reach. It's pretty cool. I've got some improvements to this, keep an eye on me.

Alright, it is way too late to be playing with guns and time machines, so I gotta go to bed. Um, today we did art, science, math... a little bit of history; we played with guns and cameras. That's pretty awesome. So if you would, subscribe and tell all your friends, I'm sure they'd enjoy this stuff too. I'll put a link down in the info on the video, please click it. The least you could do is check the website out. If you're an engineer, it's really really cool stuff.

I got my dad a chicken for Father's Day. And I want to show you a pretty interesting method that chickens have to keep their heads stable. You know, in guidance and control, you have feedback loops, and so you have to know your position and where your relative motion is going so you can compensate for it, but chickens are really good at this, so... I'll show you. Watch his head stay totally stationary as I move his body... Captioning in different languages welcome. Please contact Destin if you can help.