The physics of baseball as illustrated by Fox's new 5000 fps camera | Hacker News Reader

The physics of baseball as illustrated by Fox's new 5000 fps camera

webusers.npl.illinois.edu

213 pointsjonknee36 comments

They've been running high FPS cameras for Australian cricket coverage for nearly 10 years now. It's amazing to see the difference it makes in hitting the ball with the sweet spot of the bat, and is generally really beautiful footage to watch.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xu_bMgmd3O0

Awesome stuff. Australian sports camera work, especially for cricket, has always been ahead of the curve.

And here we are using 15MB gifs in 2012.

Great images nevertheless.

FYI, the images are substantially larger than the thumbnails on the page. Right click "open image in new tab" or "view image" (or drag it into your address bar, or do whatever other browser-specific thing required to see a full-page image).

And here are direct links to the images:

http://webusers.npl.illinois.edu/~a-nathan/pob/SpinningPopup...

http://webusers.npl.illinois.edu/~a-nathan//pob/VibratingBat...

http://webusers.npl.illinois.edu/~a-nathan/pob/ScutaroBroken...

http://webusers.npl.illinois.edu/~a-nathan/pob/ScutaroLineDr...

I was thinking the same thing. From what I can tell though, animated gifs are more popular than ever. What they lack in image quality and compression, they make up in convenience... And having no sound is actually a feature. I'm sure there's a lesson to be learned here somewhere...

And, at least for my Chrome, a lack of hardware acceleration. It nearly freezed trying to play the three gigantic (and resized to boot) GIFs. I don't want to try that site on my smartphone.

My iPhone 5 plays them with no issues whatsoever fwiw.

GIF decoding has never been hardware-accelerated (as HWA is commonly used in this context, using fixed-function units on silicon taking care of computationally expensive parts of decoding). We (as in the Internet) were laughing at dancing_baby.gif (among all the other GIFs that Geocities page had at the same document) back in 1997 played back on Pentium 2 CPUs.

And animated GIFs are just a bunch of frames indexed with 8bit color, all packed with LZW. It's no h264 to require hardware acceleration and even the latter can be decoded effortlessly without accelearation by modern CPUs.

The benefit of using video in place of these being you don't have to load and play all of them at the same time.

the images are huge, but the quality is much higher than i expected for a GIF. is there something special rendering done to preserve the quality of the image, or is this fairly standard for animated GIFs?

Images are actually larger (see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4681670), but scaled down on website, so that may make them look as if they had the quality they don't have. Though the big versions don't look that bad either.

Metadata says "Made with Evan's Movie to GIF Converter www.evanolds.com" which makes fairly modest claims - just that it converts movies to animated GIFs.

Great images.

FYI Marco Scutaro of the Giants (last 2 images) is a fun hitter to watch. He has the highest contact rate (over 94%) in all of baseball—meaning no matter who is pitching, he can usually swing and put the ball in play.

I agree. He's kicking butt this post season. The man has great mechanics and is just clutch (knock on wood). Now Hunter Pence. Good grief, that guy looks atrocious at the plate.

Hunter Pence has always been a guy who made up for absolutely terrible baseball knowledge / talent by being a beast of an athlete. I imagine we'll see a rapid drop in his ability as he gets into his early 30s.

I re-watched the last gif where he makes good contact over and over because of his action. His head doesn't move a millimetre, it's all body motion. Amazing.

From the Wired article about the camera that is linked in the OP (which is actually quite interesting in its own right):

http://www.wired.com/rawfile/2012/10/high-speed-camera-at-gi...

> they [FOX] also plan to roll out another Vision Research camera for the World Series that shoots up to 20,000 frames per second with a 500 mm lens.

> At that speed Davies says viewers should be able to clearly see things like the bending of a bat when it hits the ball or the impression the bat leaves on the ball when it first makes contact.

The most impressive part of this to me is that they are able to do these high fps shots without good lighting. Normally you want some really high powered strobes to help out. But they're doing this in either daylight or even more impressively just with the game lights. Must be some really awesome ISO performance.

One of the coolest things for me about games that span the day/night barrier is watching more and more cameras activate the automatic flash. I wonder if all those camera flashes are bright enough to have an effect on these shots.

You mean cameras from the crowd? They have no effect other than to look cool (opening ceremonies at the Olympics come to mind). It's mostly people not knowing how to operate their camera or a general lack of photography knowledge.

Here's an idea: An app that links all the wireless phone/cameras in an arena and syncs the flashes. Phone buzzes, you hold it up (with everyone else), they all flash. You could even spell out words or do the wave. Or play Conway's Life.

Unless it's already patented.

Coldplay uses something similar:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=_...

Not phone based though, which is a good thing if my experience in using phones in high capacity crowds is typical.

This is neat, thanks. They're called Xylobands, flash in sync with the music and are radio controlled via a transmitter and laptop that the company rents you for your event. http://xylobands.com/glowbands-product_info.php

That would be cool! (although probably banned from games if it got too popular...) Or you could synchronize loads of phones so they take photos at the same time and reconstruct a Matrix style 360 photo-model of a point in the game :oP

In most arenas, professional photographers have access to the built in strobe lights. You can notice (if you pay attention) to the flashing of the lights when professional is snapping pictures. They typically have little antennas on the top of the camera, so the flash is automated with the shutter. This is most noticeable at hockey or basketball games, where the arena is much smaller and the lights are closer.

At 90 mph and 5000 fps, a ball needs about 9 frames to move its own diameter.

The last video of the bat slowing down exactly as it contacts the ball would make Isaac Newton proud.

The turning radius appears to lengthen as well

At a higher fps http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFlEIybC7rU&feature=relat...

Wow, talk about repetition and crappy narration almost ruining a very interesting few clips.

These images are fantastic. I bet players would love to get the videos of themselves at these kinds of camera speeds, as it could do wonders for working on your swing. And you could finally understand why coach would always say "don't drop your elbow!"

I would have thought 5000fps would produce slower footage.

You can selectively "speed up" the footage by dropping or merging frames.

Which is actually demonstrated in the Cricket footage elsewhere on the page.

At one point a player almost catches the ball and they slow down the video even more to show how close he was.

With these images in my head, this xkcd What-If is suddenly more frightening:

http://what-if.xkcd.com/1/

I wish this guy had been my physics professor

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