How the Germans Measured Milliseconds MECHANICALLY - Smarter Every Day 283

[Destin] So this is from the 30s, right?
[Ari in a Finnish Accent] ...So this is very old... Very old technology. You can put it on by turning it here.
[Destin] WHAT!?
[Ari calmly acknowledges the awesomeness] Yeah.... And then there's this kind of stroboscope... Type of…
[Destin] It's a mechanical stroboscope!
[Ari] Yeah, yeah, there is a light bulb in the middle of the drum that has the exact amount of, like these grooves and it has to be rotating in a certain feed value and then you can get accurate results from this.
[Destin] So how does it work? So... so this is our source...
[Clearly Destin is confused] How do we...? We have to have feedback.. So how do we measure?
[Ari] Yeah yeah there's this kind of uh, you just look through this uh image port. And then you can get very -
[Destin] OH! So you do it with your eyes?
[Ari] Yeah
[Destin] Oh I saw it! [SNAP] Oh it's rolling shutter!
[Ari] Yeah... you.. the rolling sh...
[Destin] HOLY COOOOWWW
[Ari] You basically use the same method as rolling shutter.
[Destin] You use rolling shutter with your EYES!
[Ari] He he... yeah.
[Destin's nerd excitement intensifies] Can I see again? OK there's no way my camera's gonna do this..
[Ari] Yeah yeah it's difficult to shoot.
[Destin] OK so... This machine is amazing, and I know I haven't explained what you're looking at yet but that's how I experienced it I wanted you to feel that too. This is what's going on, so back in the early 1900s the people that made Leica cameras made the undisputed best cameras in the entire world, but they had a problem. They have this little thing right here on top, you know a camera shutter works like that right? but they have this little dial right here and check this out let's see if I can focus my camera that dial lets you dial the shutter speed of the camera, and then you wind the camera and then you fire the thing [CLICK] BOOM.
The time that that shutter is open is critical because if the shutter speed is open for too long you overexpose the image and everything gets really blurry, but if the shutter speed is open too SHORT then your image gets dark like this and it doesn't work so this is just for like the motion camera I'm using here, but for a still image this is even more important so, that says one one thousandth of a second.
[camera shutter snap] THAT was a millisecond. It's very fast! So if you're an engineer in charge of tuning these cameras to make sure they're spot on a millisecond how would you do that? Measuring a millisecond mechanically. That's what this machine does.
[Destin] So show me what we should be seeing.
[Ari] OK.
[Destin] So that's the frame..
[Ari] Yeah. And then you see kinds of uh, grooves there and there. You should check out the kinds of -
[Destin] So it's not just a line it's also a shape, it's a curve. So can you show it one more time?
[Ari] Yeah. So… You look through the image port -
[Destin] Okay so you see diagonals and you count. So, I’m gonna turn this off, Can I - Can I turn it off?
[Ari] Yeah. From here.
[Destin] And then turn it back on so you can see it rotating, starting up. Look at that! Okay, so you can kind of see it my -
[Ari] [Laughing]
[Destin] In my camera, you see that? Eh heh ha ha! Alright… Here, let me switch my modes on my camera. So let me go to… shutter speed. Let’s see if we can get this.
[camera shutter snap] Yeah okay we’re starting to get it. Hold on, we’re gonna get this Ari. Okay so nope, that’s - Here’s my shutter speed, 250… I’m gonna go… Okay.
[camera shutter snap]
[Destin] Yes!
[Ari] Yes!
[Destin] Did we get it?
This image is all a camera technician needed back in the 1930s to instantaneously assess whether a camera like this is functioning properly. But before I explain how that works, I realized I haven’t even told you where we are. Okay so a while back I connected on Instagram with a guy named Juho who it turns out, is somewhat famous in Finland for driving with some friends in a van from Finland to Kathmandu, Nepal. Clearly Juho is an interesting person and it ends up we have a lot in common with our interests and beliefs. He started a company in Finland called Kamerastore. That's camera with a “K” and it restores and sells old film & digital cameras. They also run what’s called the camera rescue project. I love film photography so I found myself scootering across the town of Tampere, Finland to the shop where Kamerastore does all its work. They buy old cameras from people who may have them in storage and they service them and get them back to complete working order.
What’s interesting about this company is that the people who love this kind of work are extremely passionate and they come from all over the world. I spent two days learning about all they do and I was blown away by the complicated things they figured out to keep these precious mechanical marvels alive. After a couple days Juho had me figured out. He knew I would fall in love with this machine so he introduced me to Ari and the Leica repair team and then we got to dig into this machine.
So after some digging Ari has come up with the tools that need, correct?
[Ari] Yeah.
[Destin] Okay, so, we have “The Book”. What is this book?
[Ari] This is a service manual which we have, and we can read from there how you should test those shutter speeds correctly.
[Destin] My German is… very bad. I don’t see kartoffel on here or uh, knutwurst or anything like that. So is your German good?
[Ari] Uh, no no, I’m not very good at German.
[Destin] But essentially what it looks like is we have the exact patterns that we were trying to draw earlier
[Ari] There’s kind of this ratio of the size of these patterns then you can determine if it’s kind of in tolerances... if the speed is in tolerances.
[Destin] Back in America, ridiculous setup.. for years when I've done slow motion I've used these lights right here little halogens - Oh! It's obviously on its last leg, but a company called NANLUX and said they had a light that doesn't flicker and they would let me use it. It is very difficult to tell how much light this thing is throwing because my camera’s metering but this is an absolute ton of light and I'm excited to see how she performs today.
Check this out, we’ve got a Phantom high speed camera we're gonna be running at 20,000 frames per second and we've got this Leica camera that I got from Finland. Juho & Company sent this over to me. Wind it like this and then you push this button right here, and that fires the shutter which is the curtain-type setup and then we have a fancy like ketchup bottle with a line 3000 here. so this is the uh the Line-O-Nator 3000 we'll call it. So first of all I want to show you what it looks like to just fire this thing, so let's turn the light on like crazy here. Fire it, I’m going to trigger the high speed camera - The shutter as it opens one curtain and closes the other here let's see what that looks like very slow 20,000 frames per second so you can see the first door, if you will the shutter opens up and then the second one is following shortly behind it you see that? but it's moving left to right as we have it set up here. That's interesting isn't it? So we have two curtains it's literally a rolling shutter it's rolling from one side to the other.
So that's what the shutter itself looks like. Now let's go do it with my crazy ketchup bottle contraption. Let's check this out.
Alright so before I show you this, do you remember a long time ago I made a rolling shutter video on Smarter Every Day and we did all kinds of things. you could see a propeller rotating, and what a rolling shutter does to that and we explored things like coins rolling little fidget spinners, that's kind of the principle that I'm trying to demonstrate here.
Oh shoot to do this? Okay so.. (Drops Camera on Floor) OH NO!! Oooohh No! …please work. (Increasingly worried) Oh... No.. Okay! Still works it's good! I've gotta trigger both don't I… there we go gonna rotate this, and go! We'll see if I did that. So let's look at what this thing looks like here as the shutter opens. Are you gonna open?
(hollow drone of mechanisms in slow motion) Oh my timing is off you see my line is off, okay but you can see it rolling..... Oh I need more lines. How many do I need? What do you want to do when you grow up - I want to draw lines on ketchup bottles to explain rolling shutter to myself. Checks out! Okay. Wind the camera. Get ready…
[drill whirring loudly]
[camera shutter snap] Let’s see how that looked! Weirdly excited about this, all right! I don't know if you woke up wanting to see this but now I know you really want to see this! Alright here we go, let’s roll this thing. All right, ooh there we go we got multiple stripes already. Three stripes are we gonna get four? Four. Go for five… Go for five! We gotta fifth! Yeah okay, Alright so that was fun.
Okay, so here’s what we can do. We can play it and then we can use an additive animation technique to show exactly how it adds up and we can draw the picture that you would see with persistence of vision, with your eye.
[slow rhythmic industrial fluttering] That image looks very similar to what the thing looks like doesn't it? I love this and I think it’s fantastic. So had we known the rotational rate of the ketchup bottle which by the way you time the rotational rate of that thing in Finland by the strobe effect. There’s a thing called aliasing if you can have a strobing light and another thing and they match up. It’s kind of like on a record player, on a record player there's these little dots on the perimeter of the record player and there’s a little strobing light, And as you dial the rotational velocity of the record player up and down for your music tempo if it’s rotating at the correct velocity the strobing light on the side will line up with the spinning dots on the side. If you’re going to slow they appear to be moving one direction If you go too fast they appear to be moving the other direction.
[Destin] You're adjusting the belts here and then this is moving. You can’t see the but it’s aliasing essentially. It’s moving like this, right now it’s rolling upwards.
[Ari] So then you can -
[Destin] You adjust it ‘till you get the right speed…
[Ari] I currently don’t see it from this angle but then you can adjust it so it doesn’t roll to either direction. Okay. Now it’s correct.
[Destin] So you use aliasing to calibrate something that you can then use rolling shutter to then use persistence of vision to create a pattern. That's what your brain is doing or your eye I don't know if persistence of vision is in the brain or in the eye but whoever designed this technique added all of this stuff up to be able to measure an analog device to millisecond accuracy. And that blows my mind that a human came up with that. I think it’s amazing and beautiful.
So at this point in time what I'd like to do is go back to the camera rescue project at the camera store in Finland, uh it’s actually Kamerastore, dot - I don’t know Let’s go back there and let’s see how we use this to measure a mechanical camera shutter down to the millisecond accuracy. I think this is amazing let's go check it out.
Okay Ari has a phone that has an electronic rolling shutter. Now the difference in the electronic rolling shutter and the film rolling shutter on the Leica is the Leica has a spring in it that's driving it so it has to accelerate the shutter and then decelerate the shutter. But the electronic shutter is linear right?
[Ari] Yep.
[Destin] So that's 250th? 1/250th? Can you change it to 1/500th please? That's 1/500th. Okay and now to… 1/1000th. Okay and can we look at the difference in those three photos?
So it’s getting wider. But we’re not seeing the curve, and I think the reason is is that this is being driven by a spring Does that make sense?
[Ari] Yeah.
[Destin] This is what we’re going to do. So we have two cameras. One of them has been serviced. So we know that this one has a good shutter correct?
[Ari] Yep.
[Destin] And the we have this one which is not a Leica but uh it has not been serviced you just got this camera.
[Ari] Yeah I just took it from there so it's kind of - There can be issues with the shutter.
[Destin] So what we’re gonna do is we’re gonna test these. I have the camera setup with a long exposure time. So let’s turn this thing on.
[Ari] Yep.
[Destin] Alright.
[Ari] Yep.
[Destin] All right so let's go 250 first (1/250th). Keep going. 250 (1/250th) ’till we get the shot. It’s pretty good.
[Ari] Okay.
[Destin] He’s going to 500 (1/500th).
[Ari] Yep, and then one thousand (1/1000th).
[Ari] Yep.
[Destin] Okay so we’ll put up the screen captures of that We have 250, 500, 1000 (1/250th, 1/500th, 1/1000th). And you're gonna compare that to what it should be right here.
[Ari] Yeah it was totally the same.
[Destin] Totally the same.
[Ari] Totally the same.
[Destin] And so now we’re gonna test this camera.
[Ari] Two hundred and fifty.
[Destin] Yep that’s 250, looks pretty good.
[Ari] Then about 500… Looks quite okay.
[Destin] Move it down - there you go.
[Ari] Okay, one thousandth. Okay that’s like… Those are like too narrow and too small.
[Destin] So that means this camera is firing too fast.
[Ari] Yeah.
[Destin] So we have a camera set to one thousandth of a second. But it’s firing less than that. Can we check it on the electronic machine?
[Ari] Yeah. We can.
[Destin] Just verify that, what we in fact see… We’ll see how they did in the 20s and 30s.
[Ari] Okay so this is like 1000th speed, everything is…
[Destin] That’s fast. That should be 1 millisecond, But it’s 0.6 millisecond.
[Ari] The 500th is kind of okay. 250… a little slow but still kind of okay to use.
[Destin] Haha, that’s so good! So we took a uh.. we took a completely analog “gut feel” method
[Ari] Yeah yeah.
[Destin] And we were able to get kind of a discreet reading and it was accurate. So we know that that camera is firing faster than a thousandth of a second and we knew that before we measured below a millisecond, in 19 what - 20? 1930?
[Ari] Yea, at least the technology is from there but of course this unit can be a little bit younger but the idea is that old.
[Destin] There is no sponsor on this video. This video is provided by the patrons of Smarter Every Day. Also I do want to mention Kamerastore though again no sponsorship here I just like these folks and think you would like what they do.
They take in old cameras that may be damaged or something like that They fix them up and get them working to pristine condition, Their technicians are trained in all the different models of cameras.
So it's cute that, that Juho has a company having to do with cameras but Jukka’s been certified since Juho was born. I like shooting with my old Canon A-1 and it was really fun to see how they fix these things.
So if you want to check it out go to Kamerastore.com That’s camera with a “K”. I've asked Juho if he will give you free shipping He offered to do some kind of affiliate share. I don’t want to do that. I just like them, and I think they’re cool people, and I love what they’re doing so, if you want free shipping on your camera You can do that by going to: kamerastore.com/smarter Pick out a camera that they have on their website. Order it, they’ll send it to your house and they will ship it for free.
So yeah! That’s it. Thank you so much for watching this video. I'm grateful to everyone who supports Smarter Every Day on Patreon last video you bought me missile parts, this video you helped me go to Finland and film this. So I'm grateful. That's it! I'm Destin, and you're getting Smarter Every Day. Have a good one. Bye.