The Slow Mo Guys have blown our minds by recording glass shattering at a whopping 343,915 fps, the fastest frame rate they’ve ever recorded. That is 13,756 times slower than the human eye can see.
Gav and Dan use the Phantom v2511 which has a sensor roughly the size of a full-frame camera (35mm film equivalent) and captures 25,600 frames per second at 1,280 x 800 and at 343,915 fps the quality is reduced to 256 x 144.
When recording at 25,600 fps, the playback for each second recorded translates in roughly 7 minutes of footage at 60fps, 14 minutes at 30 fps and 18 minutes at 24fps. At the insane 343,915 fps, The Slow Mo Guys explain that with 5.1 seconds of shooting, they ended up with 19.5 hours of footage (which you can watch on their second channel here) and 194.74GB of data. When putting the final video together Gavin explained on Twitter, “I did a speed ramp from 100% to over 60,000% and it was still in slow mo.”
The pair decided to show just how fast the glass shattered by comparing it to human reaction time, in this case, Dan having water poured into his eye. The glass broke at 0.000104 seconds and Dan blinked at 0.046929 seconds. In the video, it’s just possible to see the cracks spreading through the glass before it shatters completely.
The camera itself is almost worth its weight in gold. It weighs in (without a lens) a whopping 7.7 kilograms (17 pounds) and the starting price is US$150,000.
Their previous record for fastest frame rate was shattering a CD at 170,000 fps, which you can watch below.