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Friday, December 25, 2020

When The Bullet Hits The Card


Golden earring - Twilight zone
Thijs Pietersen

I rockin' out to an old YouTube playlist, playing four kinds of solitaire and this tune comes on. This thing is old: 1982. That's almost as old as my new house. That's a couple of years after I got out of school. That's when I met my wife.

The video is pretty good, it's got all the elements of a James Bond movie. "The music video was one of the first to feature a cinematic storyline and dance choreography and was a hit on the fledgling MTV network, helping the song to become the second international hit for the band." - Wikipedia

In 1958 Photo-Sonics designs 35mm-4B high speed rotary prism camera for atomic tests in the South Pacific. This camera remains today the world’s fastest 35mm rotary prism camera (3200 pictures per second). 

Just after the four minute mark, they show a playing card being cut in half by a bullet. The scene only lasts for a second. If a card is 3 inches wide, then the frame is about 10 inches wide, call it a foot. If the bullet is traveling at 1,000 feet per second, we can guesstimate that the bullet took one millisecond to cross the frame. If the video is running at 24 frames per second, then the camera that recorded this scene was running at 24,000 frames per second. Pretty good for 1982. Wikipedia's article about High Speed Photography is a little week on the history of these cameras, but the a rotary prism camera recording on 16mm film could have done the job. Photo-Sonics history page is better.




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