Hello I'm Gav. I'm Dan.

We're The Slow Mo Guys, and today, we're looking

at some slow-mo clips from the internet.

Lets get started.

[relaxed music]

This is Slow-Mo Water Balloons by Legendary Shots.

87 million views on Facebook.

Everyone's seen a balloon of water.

Yeah. Get dropped or popped.

And you never see it for this long with your eyes,

so that's why it's quite satisfying.

When they pop, the rubber's so much faster

than the gravity of the water

so you end up with, like, the shape of the water

just hanging in the air.

But in this, there's a lot of the balloon not popping.

[Dan] Yeah, equally as interesting.

Equally as interesting.

We have some very weird shapes, lots of ripples.

It's as if water had incredible surface tension.

You end up left with these really bizarre moments in time,

like when the glove is like, right up at the balloon,

it's almost like an umbrella.

Split-second moment in time that,

thanks to high-speed, we can see it for ages.

This video, it's nice and sharp.

A lot of high-speed cameras have

an optical low-pass filter, which kinda softens it.

I don't think this camera has one,

'cause it looks very crisp.

Kind of poor dynamic range,

so it looks like it doesn't have one.

They picked the right frame rate,

which I assume is just like we do,

the maximum frame rate at the highest resolution.

If you do that then, it also means that

you can go down from there always.

Yeah, they've also shot it square.

I'm not sure if that was shot like that,

or whether it's been cropped.

A lot of the high-speed cameras we used to use

actually have a square sensor,

and then you can just crop to HD.

Or, if you wanna shoot a full square,

you basically got the fastest Instagram camera.

I always think there's something,

that this is actually getting the balloons right.

We've done it a few times with different balloons,

and they've all got different levels of strength.

Sometimes they pop, sometimes they act differently.

Yeah, we've shot stuff where we tried to pop a balloon,

like on your head or something like that,

and it just wouldn't go.

They'll pop while you're filling 'em,

but then, when you're actually throwing it,

for some reason it bounces off,

and it all depends on just, like,

the quality of the rubber

or how long they've been in a drawer.

Mostly the second one for us.

Mostly the second one.

It's probably just been on the floor of the carriage.

Yeah.

This is Will Bulletproof Glass

Stop a .50 cal bullet by Fullmag.

Richard Ryan, met him, haven't we?

He's done a ton of great high-speed of guns,

lots of gun based stuff.

And you'll notice here that a lot of his footage

is really, really wide screen,

because on most high-speed video cameras,

if you lower the resolution, you gain frame rate.

And because the bullet is always sort of left to right,

it takes up very little of an HD frame.

You can just lose the top and bottom.

And he actually does a very good job in the edit,

sliding that up, and maybe showing it zoomed in again.

It's just sort of, the frame is filled.

This is obviously slow enough to see

a bullet traveling through the air,

which is an incredibly high frame rate.

But it also just shows you how quickly glass cracks.

Faster than the bullet.

Seems to be.

When we shoot stuff with bullets,

it's always good to have an exposure time

of at least 10 microseconds, just so it's not a total blur.

Because you can still shoot in slo-mo,

and if your shutter speed isn't right,

you'll have a ton of pictures

of just a very, very blurred bullet.

To reduce motion blur, you have to increase

the shutter speed which drastically lowers

the amount of light you have,

which means you have way less depth.

It's always preferable to have the bullet

sort of going left to right, as opposed to at an angle,

because it'll be in focus the whole time,

and usually the depth is, you know.

Very small. Really, really small.

He shoots a ton of his stuff completely solo,

sort of framing up on standing objects,

and then shooting the gun, triggering the camera himself.

It's very impressive.

Could you just hold the bullet in please?

[Gav chuckles]

This is Tattooing In Slow Motion by Smarter Every Day.

Actually, my favorite YouTube channel.

Destin makes these videos.

Legend. This is a great example

of showing something that everyone has seen,

but in a completely different way.

With any slow motion, I think it's pretty difficult

to shoot, especially with macro.

You've got such a fine amount of focus.

In slow motion, you need a lot of light

because each exposure time is so small.

Getting the focus is much more difficult

when you're in slow-mo and doing macro at the same time.

You've got, sort of, millimeters of depth.

So, Destin's done a great job here

of absolutely nailing that focus.

[Dan] Yeah. And not blinding

everyone with the lights. Especially the fact

that the needle is moving towards the camera.

You wouldn't necessarily notice,

but you wouldn't know exactly how hard it is

to get that sort of footage.

[Gav] You're really seeing two levels down,

on stuff that you just can't see with your eye.

I mean, you see those with your eye,

and it's almost like you're watching a blur,

like you're watching a vibration.

People get tattooed everyday,

but it gives you a completely new perspective on it,

which is really cool.

I've always wanted a tattoo,

but after seeing this video

I'm not sure I could take it. [Dan laughs]

This is Two Slow Motion Lightning Strikes.

Nature, once again, an excellent subject for slow-mo.

Lightning is very, very, very fast.

What is it, like, a third of the speed of light?

Like, a tenth of the speed of light coming down,

and I think 1/3 going up? Yeah.

We actually learned this

because we recently filmed lightning,

much faster than this clip actually.

Up to 103,000 frames a second.

You can't necessarily see

the travel of the lightning in this clip,

but you can see it lingering in the air long enough

to the point where you can tell it's in slow motion.

When the event in high-speed is so short,

it's very hard to find the clip.

If you're shooting 100,000 frames a second for 5 seconds,

your clip lasts like .05 of a second.

'Cause lightning's that fast.

It's very difficult to find where it is.

So, we actually used something called

image-based auto trigger,

which lets us know the exact frame,

and it triggered the camera itself

on the first frame of the lightning.

Yeah. So, you can very quickly

see where it was, save it, and move on to the next clip.

The last thing you want is to miss good lightning strikes

because you're still saving the previous one.

Also, it means that you don't have to

trim the footage so much,

and if you're saving 8 seconds of footage

just for one lightning strike,

you have to then save the entire thing.

Yeah. And wait for it to do that,

and then carry on.

You can just--

You don't wanna keep 3 million pictures of the sky

when only, you know,

a couple of thousand have lightning in them.

This is WTF Flat Ground Tricks, 1,000 frames a second.

Skateboarding. Skateboarding always

looks good in slow motion.

I'm noticing a lot about this footage.

There's a lot of aliasing,

which, to me, says there's no optical low-pass filter.

There's also sort of very dark areas,

and then very blown out areas like the guy's shirt.

[Dan] Yeah, super blown out.

And this is just an example

of earlier high-speed video cameras,

had a pretty lousy dynamic range.

So, bright stuff blows out way sooner,

dark stuff falls off way sooner,

so you end up with sort of very contrast-y looking footage.

Still, perfect to see what's going on here.

The quality of, light looks like it was evening.

Makes it more difficult to actually get stuff

when it's in the evening,

so you can definitely tell when the sun is lower.

I quite like it, a chill, sunny day vibe.

We did a video with Tony Hawk actually,

and Dan broke his wrist.

I did. Trying to impress him.

Trying to do some skateboarding

that I clearly couldn't do. [Gav laughs]

This is Veritasium's Slinky video, 2 million views.

Very cool, very simple demonstration

of how when you drop a slinky, it all compresses,

and the bottom doesn't move anywhere in space

until it's completely landed.

Physics. Physics, cool physics!

We shot this video as well. Yeah.

Just thought it was so cool.

Some of the stuff I like about shooting things

in slow motion is you get to see things

from a scientific perspective that you wouldn't normally

get to see necessarily, or it's more difficult to perceive.

And this is a really good demonstration of that.

Veritasium's an excellent educational channel.

Highly recommend it too.

This is a slow-mo clip of a bird having breakfast.

[Gav laughs] This is great!

[Gav laughs harder] It's great footage.

It's kind of a fail video, actually.

He puts it in his mouth and then he throws it away.

I honestly think animals are the best subject for slow-mo.

Yeah. Like something as simple

as that, you're like aww, it's amazing!

It also makes you wonder

how often animals fumble their lunch.

[Dan laughs] I mean, I was once filming

a bee drinking pollen from a flower,

and it fell out, sort of rolled out back

'cause it got drunk.

In slow-mo, you see tons of that.

That clip was probably a very short space of time as well,

because birds like that small tend to move very quickly,

and have a very high metabolisms.

So, that looks really fast.

And judging by the snow moving in the background,

it's probably only a few hundred frames a second, if that.

From maybe on a phones.

Because it's very snowy,

you got that nice flat light all around,

nice and bright looking.

So, even on a phones it looks good.

Pretty much like having a

perfect lighting situation. Yeah, nice bounce.

I think they got this, probably,

a lot of patience and maybe almost training the birds

to be able to be used to you.

There's almost no chance

[Dan] that this is the first time. Yeah.

This person has put food in their hand.

They've probably done that months before,

and maybe everyone's seen a bird eat,

but no one's ever seen it that slow,

dropping its food out of its mouth.

It's also very cute, and you can't,

like, make a bird do that.

[Gav chuckles] Aw, damn.

[Gav laughs] Alright, that's enough.

This is sneezing in slow motion

This is actually a really old video.

I think I saw this about a decade ago.

It's also really difficult to do.

When someone's sneezing,

it's an involuntary movement a lot of the time.

It's very difficult to actually capture that.

People will move forwards and backwards.

Particles are actually not too difficult in CG.

In a way, they're sort of, kind of out of focus.

It looks very real.

You might as well do it for real.

I've noticed also, the lip flappiness is real.

They've definitely done at least the movements.

I mean, there wouldn't really be any reason

not to do it for real, apart from getting the cameraman wet.

Frame rate wise, it's probably an easy thousand.

The lip flappage is-- Yeah, it's very--

Sort of in between 500 and 2,000 FPS.

I wanna say almost, this was an advert or something

for, like, washing your hands,

or like Kleenex, or something.

I can't remember what it was,

but it was something to do with germs.

It's perfect.

This is an Instagram video at the Hoover Dam,

7 million views.

Great demonstration of an updraft.

So it, with tall buildings like skyscrapers

and, you know, big flat walls like a dam,

the wind will hit it and go up.

There's nowhere else to go,

and it's sort of funneled upwards, isn't it?

I think this is so cool, 'cause it's literally

the complete opposite of what you expect.

Messes with your head a little bit

when you see physics working in the wrong way.

Even though it's working absolutely the correct way.

[Dan chuckles] This was definitely

shot on a phones. Yeah.

Someone was probably just like,

I'm just gonna pour some water off here.

Bloody hell, look what it did!

Whip your phones out! Yeah, it's pretty windy.

Let's try this. Yeah.

Which is what's cool about it, I suppose.

Maybe we should take our Phantom to the Hoover Dam,

see what goes up, see what goes down.

So, this is Venus Fly Trap In Slow Motion And Macro.

Is that slow motion?

Isn't that just normal frame rate?

You can see he's sort of slowed down

regular speed footage, which is why it's like ch-ch-ch.

The whole reason high-speed works

is that you're taking way more pictures

in the one second space, because if you don't,

you end up with pictures missing.

And if I was to swipe my hand really quickly like that,

and it was taking maybe 25 frames a second,

you get a picture here, maybe a picture here,

and a picture here, and then that's it.

But with slow motion, you take hundreds or thousands,

and you get a much more smooth image.

We can actually see what's going on.

It gives me more time to take in what's happening,

but you can get slow motion effects

with just any DSLR if you just

play back slower than you shot.

Like, you can record at 60 FPS, and play back at 24.

Yeah, as long as you play something back slower

than you shot it, it's slow motion.

This is the giant 6 foot water balloon made by us.

Yep! This was the video

that actually made our channel take off.

Our videos around that time were getting

about 20 to 30 thousand views per video,

and this got a million views in a day.

[Dan] Which back then was truly a big deal.

Yeah, I went on the news to talk about this video.

Currently, it has 177 million views,

which, as far as we're aware,

is the most viewed slo-mo clip on YouTube.

[chuckles]

That's nice. Which is crazy.

It was me a jumping on a balloon until it popped.

[Dan] We has tried lots of different things,

jumping out of a tree.

Of all the things that I thought would happen,

I didn't for a second think that the balloon wouldn't pop.

Yeah. I just bounced off it.

You actually see me get air

as it sort of flings me back into the air.

[laughs] Yeah, I remember where

I was filming this one, unusually, in the beginning.

And you kept bouncing off of it.

Yeah. And I was like, no way!

This is unbelievable!

And that's what's fun about some of the things we do.

Sometimes we just don't expect that to happen.

This was one of the early videos

we filmed on the Phantom Flex,

which did 2,500 frames a second in HD.

Good old camera, that one.

One of the few clips where I'm actually doing the thing.

Yeah, it's mostly me doing the thing.

I thought I'd enjoy that one.

[chuckles]

If there was anything I would do differently now,

I would probably jump from much higher.

I would be the one doing it, for a start.

Oh, well, you'd be doing it.

Yeah. I think you

were unavailable that day.

We'd started filming a different day,

and not managed to get exactly what we wanted.

And then-- Yeah, that's actually

a little fun fact about this clip.

At some point, it fades out and i says Some Time Later.

I think it was actually, like, three weeks later,

because you had been gone into the army to do?

Something. I had to quickly

finish the video, because the first time

I jumped on that balloon, it popped.

I had to trigger it slightly too early,

so you didn't see the everything popping out everywhere.

Basically, there's a reason now

that I just take care of the filming,

and he does all the stuff. However, the thing is

it made it so much better,

because it meant the balloon got much bigger.

Sure, the second time we did it,

it was a 6 foot balloon instead of a 5 foot balloon.

Yeah, but it also got a lot bigger as well.

'Cause it was a big balloon. No.

So, you're saying you made it better

by messing up the first time?

Yeah, yeah. A better video?

Yep. Okay, that makes sense.

Good videos, I think there's people

doing good work out there.

Yeah. In the slow mo field.

Tons of people with access to different equipment.

I think it just shows that you don't necessarily

need the world's greatest high-speed cameras

to make some genuinely interesting slo-mo footage.

There's a lot of phones stuff

out there as well. A lot of good phones stuff.

Yeah, and that'll only get better as technology moves on.