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New Toy


RobertTheBruce 3 stars Canada
Bought a new video camera, a Canon PowerShot SD4000 IS, which has a nice built-in high-speed function. At 240 frames per second it's not quite fast enough to get Mythbuster-esque shots, but it's still great for tuning:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dbw04ggHiA4 (external link)

The only thing that annoys me about it is that it saves as .MOV format, which is incompatable with Microsoft stuff (and finding a converter is a pain in the butt.) But otherwise a slick little camera. When I get time I'll have to set up the torsion whipper and see if I can get it tuned better.


Russell 3 stars Australia
Hi Robert the B.
I like it a lot.

BTW .mov files can be viewed with VLC (a free video program) and, I guess, Quicktime (mine's broken)

More! more! (Now I want one)



SpringTreb 3 stars United States
RtB,
Nice compilation video. More and more cameras come with high speed video capability and not that expensive. I use a Casio Exilim FH-20, a great help with tuning.

Craig



RIPCORD 3 stars United States
Try "Media Player Classic", an old one but it works well enough, depending on what you want in a player. It's a freebie at many places, including Cnet, Sourceforge, etc.



madmattd 3 stars United States
K-lite codec pack (external link). It's what I use, it installs the codecs so you can edit .MOV's even with Windows Live Movie Maker and other programs. And play them in Media Player or whatever.

Nice vids. HCW trajectory looked a bit flat.

Matt



3 stars
Great job; great video.

How about making one more type of trebuchet; the flywheel trebuchet?

Simply mount a bicycle wheel 3.2 diameters above the ground. Wrap it one time around with a weighted string. Spin the wheel and let the weight unwrap from the circumference of the wheel. The small mass or weigh will stop the wheel as it unwinds from the wheel’s outer edge; the mass will acquire all the motion.


trebdude 3 stars United States
No offense but what is it with you and this bicycle wheel thing?


3 stars
> No offense but what is it with you and this bicycle wheel thing?

All the flywheel experiments (that I have done) show that energy is made and momentum is conserved.

Classic Physics advocates the concept (The Law of Conservation of Momentum) and the data from my experiments supports it.

If the trebuchet is efficient it will make huge quantities of energy.

And I would guess that wheel trebuchets are as fun to build as any other treb.


SpringTreb 3 stars United States
Pequaide,
Do you have any videos of your wheel treb in action? What have you hurled and how far? I'm always interested in unusual designs.

Craig


> > No offense but what is it with you and this bicycle wheel thing?
>
> All the flywheel experiments (that I have done) show that energy is made and momentum is conserved.
>
> Classic Physics advocates the concept (The Law of Conservation of Momentum) and the data from my experiments supports it.
>
> If the trebuchet is efficient it will make huge quantities of energy.
>
> And I would guess that wheel trebuchets are as fun to build as any other treb.


Thomas 5 stars
> > No offense but what is it with you and this bicycle wheel thing?
>
> All the flywheel experiments (that I have done) show that energy is made and momentum is conserved.
>
> Classic Physics advocates the concept (The Law of Conservation of Momentum) and the data from my experiments supports it.
>
> If the trebuchet is efficient it will make huge quantities of energy.
>
> And I would guess that wheel trebuchets are as fun to build as any other treb.

But the topic was high frames-per-minute cameras.

I have to disagree that your design "makes" energy. Unless you've discovered the secret of perpetual motion. Energy is put into it and transfered to the payload.

Thomas


3 stars

> I have to disagree that your design "makes" energy. Unless you've discovered the secret of perpetual motion. Energy is put into it and transfered to the payload.
>
> Thomas

I have discovered the secret.

pequaide


Thomas 5 stars
>
> > I have to disagree that your design "makes" energy. Unless you've discovered the secret of perpetual motion. Energy is put into it and transfered to the payload.
> >
> > Thomas
>
> I have discovered the secret.
>
> pequaide

And if you shared it would no longer be a secret, right?


Walker 4 stars United States

> I have discovered the secret.
>
> pequaide

Endless Dave knows your secret.

You can not conserve what you don't put up.
So, put up or ~~~

Back to topic, PLEASE!



RobertTheBruce 3 stars Canada
I tried installing the K-Lite pack but Movie Maker still doesn't want to import MOVs. Fortunately viewing MOVs is not a problem (Quicktime runs them fine on my computer) just the editing is problematic. I did find a good freeware converter though, but thanks for the suggestions.

I've never made a wheel treb before, but I do have a few old junk bike wheels laying around. I may try that when I have a bit of extra time.


madmattd 3 stars United States
> I tried installing the K-Lite pack but Movie Maker still doesn't want to import MOVs. Fortunately viewing MOVs is not a problem (Quicktime runs them fine on my computer) just the editing is problematic. I did find a good freeware converter though, but thanks for the suggestions.
>
> I've never made a wheel treb before, but I do have a few old junk bike wheels laying around. I may try that when I have a bit of extra time.

Well, I don't know what to tell you then, sorry. It worked for me, but that's also on Win 7, it might not work on XP/Vista as nicely (I'm assuming you have one of those). Converters work I guess, in a pinch.

Matt


3 stars
I was having similar difficulties with the classroom project I have been preparing for.

The video analysis software that I use incorporates quicktime and the laptops the students are using are windows machines, which means that the only format available to both software packages is the .avi one (which creates enormous files)

So I did some research and asked around to some of my buddies who are relative experts in such things and ended up with this software package:

http://www.nchsoftware.com/prism/index.html (external link)

Its freeware, has a video format conversion tool that seems to work very well, and also has a surprisingly robust video editing utility.


trebdude 3 stars United States
Hey ScienceGeek,

How does the camera deal with the slo-mo video, does it "give" the computer literally 1000 individual images to deal with or is it all in video format?

Thanks
Tom


3 stars
> Hey ScienceGeek,
>
> How does the camera deal with the slo-mo video, does it "give" the computer literally 1000 individual images to deal with or is it all in video format?
>
> Thanks
> Tom


The Casio one that I am using:

Records the video at 1000, 480, 240, or 120 frames per second
Converts that video to a standard .avi at 30 frames per second
Saves the new video to the memory card

The 1000fps resolution is terrible, its something like 30x124 or something crazy, the 480 and 240 resolutions work just fine though (i think they are 640x480 and 800x600?)

So a 5 second shot at 480 fps gets saved as an 80 second, slow motion video clip.


trebdude 3 stars United States
Thanks!
Does it need a lot of light to get a good image?
Tom



RobertTheBruce 3 stars Canada
A clip of the torsion whipper firing:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqKVpOSo5uw (external link)


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Youtube
Display youtube video in a wiki page
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