I’ve just posted three more videos in the High Speed Videos page - this time it’s using the free weight drop tower in my college. The material being impacted is some sort of insulating wood pulp that I found lying about in the basement. The first video shows two pieces of the wood pulp lying flat and being struck by a flat striker. It’s interesting to see how the top piece apears to be sucked up as the striker rebounds - it’s not of course rather it’s due to the potential energies stored in both pieces during the compression stage. After this I wondered what would happen If I tuned both peces in their sides - they are much less stiff in this orientation so I was expecting a lot of crushing to happen - check out videos four and five to see what did happen. For the engineers out there, for each video I think the kinetic energy of the striker just before impact was 40J, with an impact velocity of around 4m/s. You can work out the mass from that if you care to do so.
By the way if there’s anything specific that someone would like to see smashed to smithereens drop me an email and I’ll do my best to accomodate - I’m sure a lot of you have some great ideas, but nothing too messy 
3. High Speed Compression of Ply Wood PART 1
4. High Speed Compression of Ply Wood PART 2
5. High Speed Compression of Ply Wood PART 3
The camera I use to take my high speed videos is a Phantom v5.1, capable of taking a whopping 98,000 frames per second. Well it was whopping, until I stumbled (not stumbleuponededed, just regular stumbled) the Vision Research website and noticed that the Phantom series camera is currently at v12 - suddenly v5 sounds rather dated. This latest camera can record video at an unbelievable 1,000,000 frames per second! I can’t imagine what kind of application would require 1,000,000fps - crack propagation in glass maybe? Apart from being oh so more advanced, it also looks a lot cooler than the v5 - the v5 looks very bulky and square. The v12 is streamlined by comparison. It almost looks like it could glide through water, maybe it’s just the handle that gives me this impression. I could not find any price details on the Vision Research site but considering that the v5 set my college back about €24000, I don’t expect we’ll be upgrading anytime soon.
Some of its more awesome features include
These are the most eye catching technical specs - there are plenty more but none that most people wold care about. I think I’ll start saving…
If you want to find one sure photography topic that will give you endless great shots then just look up (you’re outside right?). On a good cloudy day the sky changes by the minute and presents to you a multitude of shapes and colours. Throw in the sun for good measure and you can capture something real special. I found myself looking skywards after my climb of Ben Bulben. It was extremely windy, and I can not over-emphesise how windy, so my interest soon turned from making myself dizzy looking up to not falling off the edge of the mountain. In spite of my near death experience I did take three not too shabby shots of the sun passing across my lens - I was standing in the same position and merely shifted my lens to reposition the sun. TA-DAA! I also did a little touching up on them - I altered the curves to darken the darks and lighten the lights, and also saturated the blues and yellows a little to bring out the colour in the sky and sun. As soon as I get home to my camera I think I’ll start a sky portfolio of sorts - look out for more sky pictures as they happen…
For A Panoramic View, Head To Croagh Patrick
Sunrise Pictures
On the morning of the last day of my travels in Corfu, I woke up unusually early (about 6:00am as I recall; it was just before sunrise) and decided to grab my S9600 and venture outwards to see if I could discover any worthy early morning pictures. It was a clear morning and sunrise was about to hit the horizon. Luckily the hotel I was staying at was situated on Kommeno Bay, giving a wonderful view past the hotel swimming pool out onto the horizon and across to the other side of Corfu Island. Unfortunately by the time I was got into position the sun was already into it’s journey across the sky! I missed it breaking the horizon by a few minutes but I think the sunrise pictures below are still worth showing to the world. Click on each one to get a much larger sunrise picture (3696 x 2464)
Hurray! It’s the the middle of the week and everything is great! To celebrate I’d like to present some of the more surreal images I’ve stumbled upon while browsing flickr. Maybe they’ll give you some ideas for surreal images of your own. I’ve not bothered to include any captions - can you think of any? Let’s give a little incentive - 100EC points for the best caption for each photos. That’s a potential 1100EC points for the more creative of ye out there!
by Bobshaw
by Mina
by Mattijn
by gari.baldi
by Toni_V
by AzRedHeadedBrat
by Jane Wynn
by sgoralnick
by Felipe Morin
by blimpa
by whitebot
It’s been a while since my last post I know, but I have legitimate reasons; first I had to move out of my accommodation in college, then I was in a car crash (images coming soon), and then I moved right back into my very same old accommodation! Phew! But everything’s back to normal now, no more 4 hour daily commutes, I’m back down to my usual 4 minutes! Anyway, on with the show: Quicktime. And music. With a watermark. How’s it done? Being able to post it onto your own website or onto YouTube would be nice also. First an example - here’s a high speed video I posted a while ago on YouTube (I’ll post is locally as soon a I feel like it). Now we have an idea what the finished video will look like. To be able to do this you must have Quicktime Pro, meaning you’ll have to splash out a bit of cash - it’s only about $30. The following instructions are for a mac - if you don’t have one you can pick one up for about $1099.
1. Inserting Music Into Your Video
First open you movie in Quciktime and check the running time. Next choose your music file (preferably one with a similar running time to your movie) and open it also in Quciktime. You should now have both movie and music open in separate Quciktime windows. Make sure both are are at their beginnings. Now with the music window selected, go to Edit -> Select All, and then Edit -> Copy, to copy the music. Next select the movie window and go to Edit -> Add To Movie. Your music should now be overlayed on your movie - easy! Play the move to be sure. You can also check that the music has been applied by going to Window -> Show Movie Properties. You’ll see that there is a sound track accompanying the original video track.
2. Adding A Watermark To Your Video
First make a suitable watermark. Any jpg image will do, just make sure it’s not too big compared to your video (the watermark can be scale down later anyway.) For me I used this:
You can open your jpg watermark in Quicktime, much like a movie or muisc. Copy it using Edit - > Select All, Edit -> Copy. Select your movie now and add the watermark using Edit -> Add to selection and scale. If everything went OK you should end up with something like this:
It might not be wheere you want it but we can move it around in a minute. Notice the two blue circles? There are two sliders inside them you can drag along the movies timeline if you want to segment the file. Make sure those sliders are at the start and end of your movie before adding the watermark, because it will only be visible between the sliders.
Next we need to resize / move the watermark to where we want it displayed. I wanted this one to be in the top rght of the video and make it a little smaller. Go to Window - > Show Movie Properties to bring up the following window:
There are three layers in this movie file: Video Track 1, Sound Track, and Video Track 2. We want video track 2 since it’s a JPEG format. Go to Visual Settings; there we can alter the ‘Scaled Size’ and ‘Offset’ values to scale and position the watermark anywhere on the video:
You can now save it as a .mov file, or if you want to post onto YouTube, save it as a DivX. Go to File -> Export, and select ‘Movie to DivX’ from the Export drop down menu. Then go to Options beside this and Advnced Settings. You can set the encoding performance under Codec and the audio format under Audio. OK everything and let Quicktime convert the file to DivX - it will take anywhere from a few minutes to an hour depending on your video size and encoding settings.
I’ve found that YouTube is a bit fickle when it comes to uploading movies - I’ve had .movs rejected even though they’re supposed to be OK. DivX files are always accepted. The intructions for posting on YouTube are made very clear so once the file is a DivX there should be no problems with uploading.
Technorati Tags: Apple, Quicktime, watermarks, music track, embed
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