Basics of Shooting Slow Motion Video

In this video, photographers Jay P. Morgan (from the Slanted Lens) takes a look at what it means to shoot slow motion video and gives us a short fun look at smashing cameras and lenses.

Morgan got back to the YouTube Space shooting with their high-speed Phantom camera. However before he talks about the very advanced (and very expensive) Phantom camera, he looks at some of the basic ideas of slow motion photography which has been around for quite some time.

A normal video is shot at 24 frames per second, called “real time” (deadpanning on where you are or what type of look you want it can also be 25 or 30 fps). If you record 60 fps and put the 60fps video clip onto the timeline that is set to playback at 24fps, that one-second video now takes 2.4 seconds to play this result in slow motion look. If on the other hand you  were to take the original, one-second 24fps clip and slow it down to 2.4 seconds, the movement would be blurred since there is not enough data to fill the gaps between each image and it will simply look strange.

 Most DSLRs and mirrorless cameras can record up to 1080p at 60 fps. This limitation means that you won’t be able to capture slow motion which is more than twice the real time playback speed. If you want to slow down more you wither need to go down to a lower resolution (720p or even lower) or get a dedicated slow motion camera like the Phantom – which is exactly what Morgan is doing in this video. This camera can shoot 1540fps while shooting at 1080p (!) and you can see the amazing results in the video – although this will require lots and lots of lights and quite a bit of calculations to get the shot right.

You can find all of Jay P. Morgan’s videos here on LensVid on the following link. As always you can find more helpful photography tips on our Photography tips section here on LensVid.

Iddo Genuth
Iddo Genuth is the founder and chief editor of LensVid.com. He has been a technology reporter working for international publications since the late 1990's and covering photography since 2009. Iddo is also a co-founder of a production company specializing in commercial food and product visual content.

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