Bizzaro photographic sine waves

*promote

Self promoting this video and sending it back into the queue for one more try; last queued Friday, September 16th, 2011 2:45pm PDT - promote requested by original submitter Norsuelefantti.

Awesome experiment. This would be a boring blur of a video except that the 60 frames a second taken by the camera matches the 60 cycles per second of the rotating blade. The sine wave distortions are the result of minute changes in the speed of the blade as it moves around.

I have seen distortion shapes like this experimenting with waves on oscilloscopes in a lab, but have never seen them mirrored in real life before.

http://www.vgcats.com/comics/images/100222.jpg

Very interesting. The sine waves are because you are seeing a very wide angle image and the axis of the blades isn't perfectly perpendicular to the horizon. The wave is controlled by the angle of the axis of the rota, not the speed. Altering the speed a little would move the position of the peaks of the wave across the image, but not alter the height of the waves.

At the points in the video where the axis of the rota is pependicular to the horizon the horizon appears as flat. This is because as the rota spins the horizon appears in the same place in the image throughout the rotation. As the helicopter learns the camera will at some points be looking below the horizon, and at others it will be looking above the horizon, hence the sine wave effect we see. The high points in the wave are when the rota is looking low, the low points when the rota is pointing high.

If the axis of rotation of the rota is parallel to the horizon you get the vertical lines of ground/sky/ground/sky, since this is what the end of the blade is pointing at as it rotates

Are you sure the bending and waving isn't the result of a rolling shutter? No matter the speed or the angle of the rotor, the camera should still take frames with a correct perspective, unless there is said rolling shutter.

Yes, the rolling shutter is part of the effect, but it won't produce the waves on it's own. Imagine the rotas turning so the axis is perpendicular to the horizon. Regardless of if the shutter was rolling or not you will get a perfectly flat horizon.

I take a lot of panoramic shots and if you aren't controlling the axis of rotation properly when taking the shots you'll get a curved horizon.

The camera is on it's side. The scan lines are perpendicular to the rotational axis. By the time the camera takes one sweep of video, it's physically spun a few times, so what you're getting is a strobe effect which grabs info from all over the place.

Are you sure the Earth isn't twisting and warping and the helicopter is not just normal?

fact stranger than fiction

And people kept saying this was fake...

This was recorded on my birthday! Remember motherf**kers...

>> ^Payback:

The camera is on it's side. The scan lines are perpendicular to the rotational axis. By the time the camera takes one sweep of video, it's physically spun a few times, so what you're getting is a strobe effect which grabs info from all over the place.


This is what is causing the really wide angle view. It looks like the camera is catching nearly a 360 degree view of the horizon (you can see from the thumbnail pic that there's an almost complete sine wave in the horizon).

Who the hell thought this would be a good idea in the first place? And I'd love to see a video of their face when they first played this back and it wasn't just a load of blury bollox

Wow.

Love the sounds.