Ultra Slow Motion Video Of Bullet Impacts (VIDEO)

Chris Higgins at Mental Floss flags this very cool video of an ultra-slow motion camera capturing the impact of bullets on a variety of objects. Two of my favorites are of the bullet hitting an object in midair, and one going through an ice cube. The camera has been slowed down to a million frames per second. As Higgins says, ignore the music and just watch the video.

Check out this post we did earlier super slow motion cameras for more video, after you watch the one below, of course.
WATCH

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Comments

[huffy2001]

Er...that would be SPEEDED UP to a million frames per second...but who's counting?

[jrjones529]

Bullets kills people...

[Berettasskeeter]

Stop the sound bites, and start to think. A bullet is a mindless object, and a tool, and is only capable of doing what the shooter makes it do.
Semper fi

[hypnus]

Tune in tomorrow for, dropping water balloons from highway over passes.

[OdinsEye]

Excellent video! Always neat to watch.

[HelixScanr]

Anyone interested the music is from Hook the captain's "Temple (J-punch tribal mix)" also on Youtube.

[TanzaniteDiamonds]

Thank you. I was curious. (I knew it wasn't Enigma.) I've never heard of Hook before.

[wilder5121]

This might be video, since there are video cameras that can shoot at that speed. But I'm an old school "film" guy, so I'll use film to describe the concept of how it works on video OR film:

Film is normally shot at 24 fps (frames per second). It is also normally projected at 24 fps. Therefore a piece of film shot at 48fps will appear exactly half the speed (slowed down) as the original action when projected.

This camera shoots 1 million fps, requiring a very special camera. Each "shot" may be only ~1/8,000th of a second of "real time" (bullets are FAST). Therefore, you're watching maybe ~120 frames that traveled through the camera for each shot.

The film is then projected at 24fps...or tranferred to video (24 fps converted to 30fps). Those ~120 frames of film now last about five seconds onscreen...capturing an action that lasted only 1/8,000th of a second in real life.

More interesting is the ENORMOUS amount of light that it would require to achieve an exposure at 1 million fps...and with the extremely fast shutter speed it requires for sharpness. I can't do the calculations...don't have the time...but I'm sure the light to expose these would have been MANY times brighter than sunlight. Possibly they used super bright, super fast strobes synced to the camera...but it would've been blinding...literally.

[Destin]

I watch alot of drag racing at times, and last year they were doing a little feature thing during each broadcast periodically where they would show the action from what they described as a "high definition" camera that not only recorded in extremely high resolutions, but they said around 600fps from what I remember. The quality when they show it on the broadcast was simply stunning. All of the colors so vivid, granules of dust, everything in such clarity that it was as if you were looking through a window pane instead of looking at a tv screen. Some amazing stuff.

[TanzaniteDiamonds]

Speaking of "light", don't you wonder what this would have looked like in color?

[OkieIntellectual]

OMG, I thought the author meant they hit a flying object with a bullet. No, they took it up a level and hit a flying bullet with another, smaller flying pellet. Too cool.

[flamflurm]

"The camera has been slowed down to a million frames per second."

Unclear on the concept.

[stanschurman]

The camera is actually speeded up to 1 million frames per second or about 33,333 times faster than a normal movie camera. When the film is played at normal speed, the effect is to show the bullet traveling at about 1/33,333 of it's normal speed. So, if the bullet's velocity was 1,000 ft/second, it's apparent speed on the playback would be .36 inches per second.

[marco01]

Essentially, a camera that takes a million little pictures a second.

[TanzaniteDiamonds]

Incredible!

[Chipher]

It follows then that using nano-fiber reinforced lead in a tin-copper amalgam jacket with a U235 micro-tip will pretty well defeat any existing body armor in existence.

[instagladiator]

Why not use a pot roast to show what these ridiculous things do in conflicts? Albeit, I commend the photographic expertise.

[billjones224]

You are definitely the smartest person on here!

Try investigating Ballistic gelatin (used in many of the scenes).

[joependleton]

Gun-lovers' porn.

[instagladiator]

10-4

[NewLiberals]

Right down to the funky sound track.

[jrb35]

Not really. There's not a single image of a gun in the entire video. Hard to get off on that.

Anyone with an interest in physics would find this video interesting. I certainly do.

[mackbolan]

that explains your presence here.....

[Berettasskeeter]

Can you illustrate the obscene points that make it pornography?!
Semper fi

[joependleton]

"Obscene points" don't define pornography. Capacity to incite arousal does.

[stanschurman]

It would have been interesting to see the effect of a bullet hitting two dissimilar objects simultaneously. For example a piece of metal embedded in concrete so that the bullet strikes right at the interface between the two.

[Smurfaveli]

Good thought...I wonder if the bullet would somewhat shear as it impacts both surfaces?

[stanschurman]

I'm guessing that it would or would be severly deflected.

[ContraEgoiste]

Interesting how much energy is inherent in speed (momentum). Kinetic energy. If you just threw the same piece of metal (bullet) with all your might, it wouldn't cause much, if any damage at all to the targets.

[ThermoChemist]

Use of "Kinetic Energy Weapons" is something the military is looking into for future warfare.
I believe they are currently testing super powerful "rail guns". Such weapons would accelerate objects to several times the speed of sound and release them onto a target. [dependent on the size of the object and the speed, it would be like a small meteorite hitting an object..!]

"Explosive Weapons" could become obsolete in the not-to-distant future.

Viable "Energy Weapons" (like precision laser cannons) are still far from being perfected.

[OdinsEye]

Bullets are KE weapons. And they do go several times the speed of sound.

[legaleagle 45]

"I believe they are currently testing super powerful "rail guns". Such weapons would accelerate objects to several times the speed of sound and release them onto a target. [dependent on the size of the object and the speed, it would be like a small meteorite hitting an object..!]"

Several times the speed of sound is an understatement. The device uses electro magnets to accelerate an objject along mtetal rails so that it reaches incredible speeds. Theoretically, an object can be accelerated to a significant fraction of the speed of light. Practically, and based upon current technology, speeds have been achieved roughly equivalent to 10 times the speed of sound.

[truthwalker]

Pat Tillman's family agrees it's very cool:

http://michaelfury.wordpress.com/2009/10/07/illegal-as-hell/

[FrTown]

Very inappropriate, unless you meant something not conveyed by your message.

[ellawensmom]

Actually, even though it's off topic, I'm pleased by the reminder of the Tillman brothers. Good men, and what happened to Pat shouldn't be brushed to the side or forgotten.

[instagladiator]

And there are thousands upon thousands of other similar incidents that shouldn't be forgotten. But guess what?

[Cycadeoidea]

Very impressive! However, disappointing that the individual clips are so short. Maybe these are just teasers?

[eyrieowl]

Well, the sort of are, in that they were (according to the comment on the video) pulled from the website of the company that makes the video (that's why all the copyright stuff). However, they probably don't get much longer. If they're shooting 1MM frames per second...that's going to make a big video really fast. They've got to have some crazy compression going on to make it work. 1MM frames (1 second of real time) gives you as many frames as a 9+ hour movie shot at 30 frames per second (fairly standard). That's a BIG movie. Hard drives don't run fast enough to write that much data in a single second, so that means they must be writing to RAM...which means they're probably going to top out at ~100GB of data before the video has to be cut short.

[Cycadeoidea]

Good point. Also, at 1MM FPS I presume that the limitations of how quickly you can move the video data across a matrix of RAM starts to play in as well, i.e., it's not just an issue of recording capacity. There must be a trick to triggering the camera at just the right moment, like maybe relying on the bullet to pass in front of a photo cell. I imagine they must have recorded lots of non-events before they got the timing down.