The interesting thing for me about this video is the math behind "scaling up" the rhythm of the song, syncing that with the "events" (popping balloon, splodin guitar, etc), so the 6000fps cameras can cut down to, idk, 500fps or something in editing and have them all reflect the actual rhythm. Pretty cool stuff
That was one thing that occurred to me while watching the video, because they keep transitioning between different speeds they can choose the transition point so that the music will continue to match up even if in real time there was a very minute timing difference that would cause a problem. I'm assuming that's how they got the various flipbooks to sync up perfectly, where the lead singers singing when they went back to real-time video for a second.
I think I have all their albums, I love their videos and their music is often pretty good. I suppose I should know his name. (Edit: Damien)
Note that in their FAQ they specify that they really weren't fiddling with the playback speed: it's not constant but it has a handful of discrete jumps to different rates at each part (eg: the guitars exploding versus the lip syncing are at different rates but the rate is constant within the guitars exploding). Knowing this makes it much more impressive.
You are correct. From the background notes [1] on the band's page:
"It is not all one speed, but each section is at a constant rate, meaning that time does not “ramp” (accelerate or decelerate). We just toggle from one speed to another. When the guitars explode, we are 200x slower than reality (6,000 frames per second), but Tim and Andy’s short bursts of lip sync (Tim twice and Andy once) are only 3x slower than real life (90 frames per second). The watermelons are around 150x, and the spray paint cans are a little over 60x."
Each section has it's speed, but in each of those section the speed is not manipulated.
Like, the explosions at the beginning and water balloon at the end are really synced with the music and not edited to appear in sync.
I doubt it. In the article someone else linked they said all the events were pretty tightly coordinated. I don't want to take the time to actually nerd out on the math, but it seems like there'd be one ratio you'd apply to everything. Like if the song's 124bpm at 60fps (2.066..7beats per frame), you'd want to multiple all that by 100 if you're shooting at 6000fps, so like 206.66..7 beats per frame. THen you can run the video back in super slow mo (60 fps again) and get the real 124bpm deal?
You're more right than wrong. While they do change the speed, the changes were pre-planned and weren't adjusted to make up for timing issues (I.e. allowing down or speeding up so the flipbook / lipsync lines up).
