Wheels Goin' Round

I am always amused, while watching a movie or TV show, when you see a car travelling along the road and the wheels appear to be going backwards. It used to puzzle me when I was a kid until I read somewhere that the illusion of backwards motion is caused by the shutter speed frame rate of movie cameras being a bit slower than the rotation rate of the tires. Or maybe a bit faster, I forget which. Anyway, there's a mismatch, and that mismatch produces the weird going-backward illusion that. I've seen this with bicycles, too.

So, what would it be like if the camera speed frame rate perfectly matched the rate of rotation?

You'd get a different illusion, of course. You'd get something like this:

When a cameras shutter speed matches a helicopters rotor, this happens ??#wtf #weird #cool pic.twitter.com/DWRVeKBb4W

— iLOVEWEIRD (@iloveweirdtweet) March 7, 2017

Open Thread until ace shows up.

posted by OregonMuse at 11:55 AM

| Access Comments