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Hello, a while ago on a livestream Adam mentioned working on AI , I just came across this video czcams.com/video/QiAmMsxuE2k/video.html the person in this doing the interview might know who recorded him , or you might be able to find from it the footage and possibly footage of Adam working on his building ?
Your comments on the slowmotion really resonated with me with regards to how much and how fast technology can change things. I'm an industrial engineer and a few years ago, when 3d scanning technology crossed our "ease of use" and price threshold. Ever since then we 3d scan everything where we are designing something. We usually also scan after we have mounted whatever we built. I really cant describe how much it changes how I work when I could go from photos and measurements to having a 3d point cloud right where I am working on it, in my CAD program.
Yeah, I'm sure that they've all met before at places like comic con or something, but I feel like both SED and SMG are kind of the little brothers to Mythbusters, and I'm sure those guys very much look up to Adam and are happy to know that he's just as much a fan of their work as they are of his.
There's a lot of channels that would bend over backwards to have Adam join them on a video, and I'm sure he'd probably jump at the chance to do it when being around others is available again.
I love that after this long, there are still questions about the show to be asked and new and interesting answers to be told. It says a lot about how well the show was done.
I think the shot where the rocket sled 'snowplow' perfectly bisected a car vertically is the most beautiful single shot ever captured on film, not just on Mythbusters.
@@lauraodonoghue1348 Never managed to get my mom to watch it : ( She thinks they're a bunch of crazy that like to blow stuff up and test things no one has asked before : |
One of the only shows I would consider "my" shows that my wife would watch with me. We watched all the episodes together. That's a pretty meaningful experience!
@@logitech4873 yuuuup ask any armor or artillery veteran; such footage ain’t new. Sure, the SlowMo guys captured great footage, and presented it in their typically fun and approachable format, but from a technical standpoint, it wasn’t exactly novel.
Ironically tracking projectiles is a very common task in weapons testing. Luckily you can achieve this with Mirrors and have a stationary camera. czcams.com/video/qn5YQVvW-hQ/video.html - Here is a ultra fast tracking camera.
So when is the Slow Mo Guys collaboration happening then, we all want it I think? I know Gavin wants it, surely theres something to build in the shop and see the whole thing in beautiful slow motion. (maybe the triple Adam, Destin, Gavin collab?)
I'm not sure why it took me so long, but after Adam referenced both Slow Mo Guys and Smarter Every Day in the first 4 minutes, I finally subscribed. :-D
@@tonyregola1659 10 months ago a friend posted the Slow Mo Guys 4K Glitter extravaganza. I was on CZcams for Tested at that time but that was all. Gav & Dan took me down the CZcams rabbit hole. With that show, you are never late. They are well worth the wait, just as Adam is.
Adam likes Gavin, Gavin likes Adam. I have wanted some sort of collab for YEARS, and I still hope it happens one day. It would be lovely to see them interact with eachother.
That collab would be them fanboying over each other's work. I would love to see an idea from Adam's brain captured by Gavin's expertise with the Phantom. My mind revels at what Adam can come up with considering his background with slow mo on Mythbusters.
@@JosephDavies Gavin is one of the two people making vodeos for Slow Mo Guys. Gavin is the one behind the camera. I highly recommend their channel. It has some amazing footage that you simply cant see elsewhere in the world.
@@JosephDavies I know it's been two years, but in case you still don't know anything else about Gavin Free (and for anyone else who stumbles on this comment), he's actually had a very successful internet personality and filmographer since 2006. Got his start doing music videos, became a director and creative collaborator with Rooster Teeth in 09, he's done some voice acting, and he's a real stand up guy.
Seeing the shockwaves of explosions was always amazing in slo-mo. Because it's just air, it's invisible, but you're seeing on camera the extreme difference in air pressure over a space of centimetres, and it's something that you wouldn't even think would be visible until you actually see it
I love how easy high speed is now ! As an archer being able to film myself at highspeed to review my form when im practicing is insanely helpful and i didnt have to go to an olympic training center to get that
I think my favorite high-speed shot is the final go at Compact Compact. The shot of the rocket sled tearing through the compact car as if it didn't exist until it made it about halfway into it. You don't really understand how powerful something is until it takes a thing that you're familiar with and completely demolishes it with relative ease.
An interesting summary of 21st Century slo-mo. During my career in TV, slo-mo went from being only available on film right through to the digital era. So here's a potted history as a sort of prequel to Adam's excellent video. In the 70s, the new tech was Video Disc recorders. Ampex and RCA both made these, using a single plater computer disk drive. You could get 30 seconds of broadcast video on one side. The machines cost in excess of $100K in mid-70s money, and could only record at 25 or 30 FPS. By recording one frame per revolution you could slow down by repeating frames. With a head on each side of the disk, you could get one minute of video by recording the 1st 30 seconds going inwards and the 2nd by coming back to the edge. Drawback were that the picture quality was reduced as you got towards the centre of the disk, and you had to play back on the same machine. By the end of the 70s, 1" video tape had reached the broadcast world, and again made a step change. You could still only record at 25/30 FPS, but you had full variable speed down to still, and backwards. Again various manufacturers were involved, Ampex and RCA, but now the Japanese also and Sony joined the party. the same sort of controller as the disk recorders were used with tape, and the huge advantage was that you could have up to 90 minutes of recording. When the young Scot Jim Watt beat Alfredo Pitalua, at the Kelvin Hall in Glasgow on 17 April 1979, the fight was shown live on NBC. I had been hired to do the slo-mo with an Ampex VPR-2 1" VTR. I ended up doing slo-mo's to and from freeze frames at the beginning and end of each commercial break live on US national TV! It was terrifying. I had headphones with the local director in one ear and the network director in Chicago (?) in the other. An interesting evening! In the 80s (forget exactly when) Sony came up with a Super Slo-Mo. This used a special camera with a fixed 3x frame rate, of 75 or 90 FPS. You could play it back at 25/30 or any speed slower. Obviously with the high frame rate the slo-mo ws much higher quality, but the downside was the cost. On camera and recorder set could only be used together, and cost around $1 Million in mid-80s money! By the end of the 80s Digital Video Tape had arrived and it was now possible to do high quality slo-mo with standard cameras, because the VTRs did really good interpolation between frames on playback. By the mid-90s solid state sensors and JPEG/MPEG file storage started to introduce a new change. Early cameras still only worked at 25/30 FPS, and you had to use special drives to record onto. Solid state memory was still expensive as were hard drives. I remember buying the latest 9Gb SCSI drives for about £4.6K each! That brings us to Adam's early experience. Those early slo-mo cameras had to record on to solid state memory or RAM, so could probably manage only 10 seconds at the highest frame rates. You would then dump the file onto the hard drive on a computer to play it back. The files were big and transfer speeds were slow, so it took a while. but it was better than 30 years before, when you would shoot on film, then wait for the overnight rushes to see whether you had go the shot. Now you can do it with your phone! And edit on your iPad! Fun times.
Starting out in a time when viewers needed to send comments or questions about the show over snail mail and wait, Adam I dont think you realize how amazing it is to be able to fall in love with a show, then the show run its course, and after many years, be able to just go on to an online video platform and watch you explain the past in detail and answer questions from the viewers that could be only a few hours old at the time. Love your work, thank you for all the great content
Love when u talk about Mythbusters. First show (at least in Spain) with the right combination of science, design, building and some art. But the two of you...Such a energy around Jaime and Adam...
I just got Discover+ and have been rewatching the series; and I am AMAZED at how much stuff from past myths are about the shop. I paused the video somewhere in season 3, and I could recognize like 5 different things from just one frame.
@@linklover10203 Damn, it looks like there’s only a few of the newer seasons, at least in the Finnish catalog. I’ll have to see if with some VPN I’d have better access...
when i watched gavin do the slow mo shots of him talking with and without a mask to see the spit droplets and stuff. I immediately thought of your myth about testing sneezes and doing the slow mo shots of sneezes in different color
Talking about setting the frame so your brain can process more quickly, that's why road signs and markings are designed in such a way that so no matter the type of intersection or sign you come across, even if you've never experienced that type or area before, you can more quickly process how to use that information. Also it's why dumb doors suck.
I remember watching MythBusters with my family and I was always waiting for you to show your recordings from the high-speed cameras. For several years I have been dealing with high-speed cameras (mainly for testing in research laboratories) and each time I can't wait to see the final recording, no matter if it's a crash test, explosion or fluid mechanics.
Seriously Mr. Savage, you need to come back to TV and get a wider audience about science and how exciting it is, re ignite our imagination and fascination of the world around us. You have a great gift of captivating listeners and conveying information incredibly well. Thank you for all your hard work
One of the best things about Mythbusters opposed to other science adjacent programs is that they didn't dumb everything down to appease the lowest common denominator like others had the tendency to do. The Mythbusters also never went to the other extreme and made it sound like the most boring thesis paper ever put to film.
I think it was mentioned on the show at some point, maybe in one of the recap episodes, but apparently the high speed camera happened to malfunction right on that shot, so they had to play the regular camera shot back frame by frame as a substitute. There apparently just is no high speed footage in existence of the cement truck explosion.
I remember for a science project I tried measuring the speed of a model rocket using a regular camera and thanks to Mythbusters in 5th grade I knew everything I needed to do measure it.
Something else that’s a major benefit of conveying what’s happening immediately in a shot is that not only does it allow your brain to figure out what’s happening, it also allows your brain to be _wrong_ which lets you get surprised.
I feel like I understand everything you’ve ever done now that you explained that whole “the faster you get the narrative the more information you’re able to get from the following scene” thing.
Some of the machinery I work on at work folds cardboard boxes, squirts glue on specific parts, then stamps it and folds all the flaps in, it's not lightening fast but it's quicker than you can see if you're trying to figure out a fault... I film it forming the box in slow motion to see what's happening, every time I do that I'm amazed I can pull this thing out of my pocket and just do that.
its nice to see Adam's understanding of what brought him to our attention. obviously, he's so much more than Mythbusters, but most of us wouldn't have known him if it wasn't for that show. he doesn't ignore it and seems to embrace it. many people don't like being remembered for one thing. like I said, he's so much more than that show, but thats what most of saw him doing. (and loved it. still do.)
I love how eager Adam is to teach and share what he knows. And I totally feel like Adam with the 'you don't know how good you have it.' XD I remember how excited I was to get a camera that took a film that you just dropped in instead of needing to feed it into the camera and how revolutionary that was. And it's pretty obsolete now. Hell, the really nice digital camera my in-laws bought me for work is mostly useless compared to just using my phone. It's wild.
It's been so long since I've seen Mythbusters but I watched a lot and I still remember all those helpful markings and indications in frame. You guys did an amazing job And I have never forgotten that shot of you being slapped since the first time I saw it. I bring it up in conversation on occasion, it's amazing
What i love about Adam, is that he shows zero resentment or disdain for myth busters to this day. He's still excited to tell stories and talk about it.
... and back then it was live TV and by the time we saw what it was you wanted us to see the moment had past and we could not rewind... so thank you for indicators and instant replays.
Back in about 2007, I got one of the first mobile phones which could do high speed recording. I think it was only 120fps but my housemate (a film student) and I had so much fun recording everything we could think of! I remember one time we spent most of an afternoon throwing water balloons at my bedroom window, recording from the inside, trying to find the right balance of 'water balloon breaks', 'window doesn't break', and 'looks good on camera'. We didn't get anything impressive, but I had nice clean windows afterwards!
The explanation of setting up a scene for a slow motion capture makes so much sense. I guess that’s one of the things I learned about today. Old video, but thought I’d say this either way
Adz, an absolute pleasure seing how emotional it is for you talking about mythbusters. I was devoted to the show.. before youtube. Still following Tory. Love the channel. I try to always like, rarely get to comment. Really miss but still loved mythbusters. Will always follow you my ole friend. Rob from UK : ) keep it together x Forgot to mention the passion you have.. absolutely awesome. im sorry that with Furlough in UK and being a youth i haven't been able to be a patron... give me time and I'll hopefully buy all merch and support : )
Adam made me cry in the last episodes of mythbusters... He go soo emotional talking about all the probs that he was about to go smashing through.... Mythbusters was the best part of my child hood... It was fun learning.. thank u adam 👌
5:07 ... framing a high speed shot in a way that it tells the story of what's going to happen: I couldn't agree more. It's very helpful to understand the high level aspects of what's going on, so the viewer can concentrate on the interesting details the shot is meant to investigate. Thanks a lot for thinking of that! One of many nice puzzle pieces of making Myth Busters one of the best science for everyone programs that ever existed.
I am also a huge fan of Destin on Smarter Every Day. I have one of his signed baseballs! I love watching him do crazy stuff. It's like watching Mythbusters again. I miss it and still watch the reruns every chance I get.
my favorite high speed shot from mythbusters was from dynamometer of death when they launched that tire belt through a car window and decapitated that ballistics gel head
Thank you for your description of how and why to clearly delineate what's going to happen on the screen so that people can understand it fully. Such a key part of visual science communication. I've had a vague sense of that in the back of my head while making videos but it's incredibly useful to have it put into words like that.
Any high speed shot at the New Mexico school with the rocket sled is awesome. Also I loved the exploding cement truck. One frame later: boom, no more truck
That shot of the baseball glove and the leather turning to almost a liquid was one of the craziest things I've ever seen. Smarter Every Day is probably my favorite channel. Love his videos.
What about *lighting* some of those high speed shots? It's apparent when watching some clips that the depth of field isn't very far at all, and when watching some of the setup for the shot you see ridiculous floods come on right before the event. Is that something just inherent to the limited exposure time per frame, or is there another way to mitigate that?
Yeah. With cameras, you either need a bright image or a long shutter speed. High speed photography requires a lot of light. Technically you can boost the sensor’s sensitivity (gain), but that’s going to reduce the overall quality of the image.
I suppose a really huge lens could capture more light (like astronomy does with telescopes). But that gets expensive, and I think has downsides like depth of focus (which again isn't a problem for astronomy when everything is effectively at infinity). I don't know if a larger sensor can help; probably not much if at all. But a larger chunk of semiconductor costs more to manufacture. The higher pixel resolution you want, the less light you're getting in each pixel, so again you need it brighter to get good signal-to-noise ratio. Cooling the detector (to cryogenic temps) can I think reduce noise, but that's very expensive. If better illumination is possible at all, it's usually the best bet. Thus, very bright spot / flood lights.
We used high speed film cameras until about 2000, when we switched to high speed digital cameras for crash test analysis at work. I'm very familiar with the tech.
Lighting! Lighting! Lighting! If you want to know about the challenges of high speed video, getting sufficient light has to be one of the top ones. Also depth of field, which is also related to capturing sufficient light. Often, high speed video cameras use the lens wide open to gather more light and doing so results in miserably thin depth of field and difficult focusing. In order to keep something that travels toward or away from the camera in focus you need a tilt-shift lens and they're often not fast lenses.
You drew either a target or a 10 year old's version of a boob. The problem with high speed cameras especially earlier models is their run time is so short your timing has to be rather precise.
7:47 "... each shot would tell the whole story of the experiment ..." -- Excellent reminder of something I was taught in science regarding the use of figures and tables. Ideally, in any scientific document, any given figure or table should be able to "stand on its own", i.e. it should be clear, concise, and complete enough that your reader can understand it, without necessarily having to refer back to the surrounding text of your document. (Of course, it rarely happens that way, because us scientists want to include EVERY LITTLE DETAIL instead of just focusing on what's important... 😅)
What an insightful post, thank you for explaining what is important to show beforehand so you can just watch what happens instead of trying to figure out what WILL happen
For me, if it wasn't for the high speed camera used on Mythbusters, I would've never known what a pressure wave actually looks like, when an explosion happens. That was always one of the cooler aspects of watch those in slo-mo.
There's a video on Applied Science about building a rig that spins a high speed camera around the action while recording, so the camera revolves entirely around the subject in the half second or so the shot covers.
In early 2000's when mythbusters just started, black and white phones were still the norm and watching their high speed footage was incredible. Today iphones can do the same and videos of high speed is all over YT. YT didnt even exist until the third season of MB. I feel old
It must be the trained film actor in you to NOT look into the lens of the camera. LOL! I love that you mentioned The SloMo Guys and Smarter Every Day! Two of my favorite YT channels!
Adam. I think the word you are looking for is 'priming'. Setting up the shot with all the markers primes the viewer with expectations about what is to come.
Awesome to hear you mention Destin and the Slo Mo Guys! Love them! I've been wondering, where's the best place to watch all of the Mythbusters content nowadays?
The importance of explaining (in this context: visualizing) things (from 5:00)is extremely important even in trivial cases. I always have to argue with colleagues etc to put here that word or use here a different color to highlight this bit etc. "Why, this is obvious!" No, it's not when you are not prepared, when you see it at the first time, when you haven't used it for a while. People tend to get confused even in easy situations, and confusion understanding images is even more frequent.
Actually, in my experience is that you should state even the obvious if that's key for understanding something. This comes mostly from GUI programming (with very obvious reasons) but also simply explaining non trivial things.
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Hello, a while ago on a livestream Adam mentioned working on AI , I just came across this video czcams.com/video/QiAmMsxuE2k/video.html the person in this doing the interview might know who recorded him , or you might be able to find from it the footage and possibly footage of Adam working on his building ?
Your comments on the slowmotion really resonated with me with regards to how much and how fast technology can change things.
I'm an industrial engineer and a few years ago, when 3d scanning technology crossed our "ease of use" and price threshold. Ever since then we 3d scan everything where we are designing something. We usually also scan after we have mounted whatever we built.
I really cant describe how much it changes how I work when I could go from photos and measurements to having a 3d point cloud right where I am working on it, in my CAD program.
OMG, you probably just made Gavin, Dan, and Destin's days.
He made my day for Destin
Facts!
Yeah, I'm sure that they've all met before at places like comic con or something, but I feel like both SED and SMG are kind of the little brothers to Mythbusters, and I'm sure those guys very much look up to Adam and are happy to know that he's just as much a fan of their work as they are of his.
There's a lot of channels that would bend over backwards to have Adam join them on a video, and I'm sure he'd probably jump at the chance to do it when being around others is available again.
They both cited mythbusters as giant and direct inspirations.
“When we were lighting farts…” (Is this figurative?) “… every shot we had to wait 45 minutes…” (Nope. That’s a literal statement…)
I love that after this long, there are still questions about the show to be asked and new and interesting answers to be told. It says a lot about how well the show was done.
I think the shot where the rocket sled 'snowplow' perfectly bisected a car vertically is the most beautiful single shot ever captured on film, not just on Mythbusters.
I really like the part where you can clearly see the tape peel off a few feet in front of the sled due to the intense air pressure. 😁
Watched every episode of Mythbusters when they premiered. Best show ever.
It’s the only show my mum and the rest of the family agreed on so we watched all of them as a family it’s amazing
@@lauraodonoghue1348 Never managed to get my mom to watch it : (
She thinks they're a bunch of crazy that like to blow stuff up and test things no one has asked before : |
me too, the show changed the world as we know it.
One of the only shows I would consider "my" shows that my wife would watch with me. We watched all the episodes together. That's a pretty meaningful experience!
That slo mo of the lawnmower of death blade heading for the camera is the single most awesomely terrifying shot of the entire series
The SlowMo guys capturing a PANNING shot of the supersonic tank round in flight. Most impressive high-speed I've ever seen.
They used existing tech to do that, and there's lots of videos like it.
@@logitech4873 yuuuup ask any armor or artillery veteran; such footage ain’t new. Sure, the SlowMo guys captured great footage, and presented it in their typically fun and approachable format, but from a technical standpoint, it wasn’t exactly novel.
Ironically tracking projectiles is a very common task in weapons testing. Luckily you can achieve this with Mirrors and have a stationary camera.
czcams.com/video/qn5YQVvW-hQ/video.html - Here is a ultra fast tracking camera.
They did it with a backyard setup. That's the impressive part.
@@Yora21 They really didn't lol. They got professional equipment and hired an expert to operate it.
Seeing the grid lines go up in an episode was always an exciting moment. "Ooh, there's going to be a high-speed shot!"
3:13... "it's really hard to focus..." followed by a long pause. So very relatable in so many contexts
One of my favorite slow-mo shots from Mythbusters was the water heater rocket going through a 2 story house.
czcams.com/video/fUkjXGfCLIM/video.html
@@RafaelSantos-nr9nw
Yep. That's the one. Watching that steam powered "rocket" punch through the house is a thing of beauty.
When he said slow-mo that was the shot I thought of too
Mine, too!
@@RafaelSantos-nr9nw I was hoping that channel would have more raw Mythbusters footage, but alas, it's just videos slandering Obama lmao
So when is the Slow Mo Guys collaboration happening then, we all want it I think?
I know Gavin wants it, surely theres something to build in the shop and see the whole thing in beautiful slow motion.
(maybe the triple Adam, Destin, Gavin collab?)
The nerd internet would implode on itself, perfectly captured in slow-mo, so we can all see it in 4KHD. Thanks Gav.
We TOTALLY want this too. Stay tuned; we'll figure something out!
@@tested Then I shall cultivate my patience and set any & all alerts I can with enthusiasm.
I'm not sure why it took me so long, but after Adam referenced both Slow Mo Guys and Smarter Every Day in the first 4 minutes, I finally subscribed. :-D
@@tonyregola1659 10 months ago a friend posted the Slow Mo Guys 4K Glitter extravaganza. I was on CZcams for Tested at that time but that was all. Gav & Dan took me down the CZcams rabbit hole. With that show, you are never late. They are well worth the wait, just as Adam is.
Adam likes Gavin, Gavin likes Adam. I have wanted some sort of collab for YEARS, and I still hope it happens one day. It would be lovely to see them interact with eachother.
That collab would be them fanboying over each other's work. I would love to see an idea from Adam's brain captured by Gavin's expertise with the Phantom. My mind revels at what Adam can come up with considering his background with slow mo on Mythbusters.
Who is Gavin?
@@JosephDavies Gavin is one of the two people making vodeos for Slow Mo Guys. Gavin is the one behind the camera. I highly recommend their channel. It has some amazing footage that you simply cant see elsewhere in the world.
@@olekaarvaag9405 Thanks. :) I've heard of the channel but didn't know them by their first names.
@@JosephDavies I know it's been two years, but in case you still don't know anything else about Gavin Free (and for anyone else who stumbles on this comment), he's actually had a very successful internet personality and filmographer since 2006. Got his start doing music videos, became a director and creative collaborator with Rooster Teeth in 09, he's done some voice acting, and he's a real stand up guy.
Seeing the shockwaves of explosions was always amazing in slo-mo. Because it's just air, it's invisible, but you're seeing on camera the extreme difference in air pressure over a space of centimetres, and it's something that you wouldn't even think would be visible until you actually see it
Mythbusters and slow motion were made for each other.
It's almost like they invented slow-mo just for them 🤣
"You heard him, don't do it!" - Jamie Hyneman
I love how easy high speed is now !
As an archer being able to film myself at highspeed to review my form when im practicing is insanely helpful and i didnt have to go to an olympic training center to get that
Seeing the shockwaves from highspeed explosions always blew my mind.
I think my favorite high-speed shot is the final go at Compact Compact.
The shot of the rocket sled tearing through the compact car as if it didn't exist until it made it about halfway into it.
You don't really understand how powerful something is until it takes a thing that you're familiar with and completely demolishes it with relative ease.
An interesting summary of 21st Century slo-mo. During my career in TV, slo-mo went from being only available on film right through to the digital era. So here's a potted history as a sort of prequel to Adam's excellent video.
In the 70s, the new tech was Video Disc recorders. Ampex and RCA both made these, using a single plater computer disk drive. You could get 30 seconds of broadcast video on one side. The machines cost in excess of $100K in mid-70s money, and could only record at 25 or 30 FPS. By recording one frame per revolution you could slow down by repeating frames. With a head on each side of the disk, you could get one minute of video by recording the 1st 30 seconds going inwards and the 2nd by coming back to the edge. Drawback were that the picture quality was reduced as you got towards the centre of the disk, and you had to play back on the same machine.
By the end of the 70s, 1" video tape had reached the broadcast world, and again made a step change. You could still only record at 25/30 FPS, but you had full variable speed down to still, and backwards. Again various manufacturers were involved, Ampex and RCA, but now the Japanese also and Sony joined the party. the same sort of controller as the disk recorders were used with tape, and the huge advantage was that you could have up to 90 minutes of recording. When the young Scot Jim Watt beat Alfredo Pitalua, at the Kelvin Hall in Glasgow on 17 April 1979, the fight was shown live on NBC. I had been hired to do the slo-mo with an Ampex VPR-2 1" VTR. I ended up doing slo-mo's to and from freeze frames at the beginning and end of each commercial break live on US national TV! It was terrifying. I had headphones with the local director in one ear and the network director in Chicago (?) in the other. An interesting evening!
In the 80s (forget exactly when) Sony came up with a Super Slo-Mo. This used a special camera with a fixed 3x frame rate, of 75 or 90 FPS. You could play it back at 25/30 or any speed slower. Obviously with the high frame rate the slo-mo ws much higher quality, but the downside was the cost. On camera and recorder set could only be used together, and cost around $1 Million in mid-80s money!
By the end of the 80s Digital Video Tape had arrived and it was now possible to do high quality slo-mo with standard cameras, because the VTRs did really good interpolation between frames on playback.
By the mid-90s solid state sensors and JPEG/MPEG file storage started to introduce a new change. Early cameras still only worked at 25/30 FPS, and you had to use special drives to record onto. Solid state memory was still expensive as were hard drives. I remember buying the latest 9Gb SCSI drives for about £4.6K each!
That brings us to Adam's early experience. Those early slo-mo cameras had to record on to solid state memory or RAM, so could probably manage only 10 seconds at the highest frame rates. You would then dump the file onto the hard drive on a computer to play it back. The files were big and transfer speeds were slow, so it took a while. but it was better than 30 years before, when you would shoot on film, then wait for the overnight rushes to see whether you had go the shot. Now you can do it with your phone! And edit on your iPad! Fun times.
The water heater in slow-mo at Alameda is probably my favourite
Starting out in a time when viewers needed to send comments or questions about the show over snail mail and wait, Adam I dont think you realize how amazing it is to be able to fall in love with a show, then the show run its course, and after many years, be able to just go on to an online video platform and watch you explain the past in detail and answer questions from the viewers that could be only a few hours old at the time. Love your work, thank you for all the great content
The world needs a Destin + Adam crossover video!
Who is Destin?
I wonder if Destin has seen this yet. Him and Adam building something together would likely be the best science youtube all time.
@@JosephDavies his channel is smarter everyday
@@neiljhopwood Ah, thanks!
Most important tip: turn on the camera. Cement truck explosion.
The black and white rulers behind a lot of slomo shots are some the the most iconic Mythbusters sights for me.
Love when u talk about Mythbusters.
First show (at least in Spain) with the right combination of science, design, building and some art.
But the two of you...Such a energy around Jaime and Adam...
I just got Discover+ and have been rewatching the series; and I am AMAZED at how much stuff from past myths are about the shop. I paused the video somewhere in season 3, and I could recognize like 5 different things from just one frame.
Mythbusters is on Discovery+ ?!?!?!!
@@oscarn- Oh yeah! There's an impressive catalog actually. I'll probably go onto the nature documentaries next
@@linklover10203 Because I just got it to watch Savage Builds, and I didn’t even realize there would be Mythbusters as well! Awesome!
@@linklover10203 Damn, it looks like there’s only a few of the newer seasons, at least in the Finnish catalog. I’ll have to see if with some VPN I’d have better access...
@@oscarn- I'm on american dervers and they should have all of them. At least the non-reboot ones
As a kid we watched a lot of Mythbusters in school for science & related classes. Absolutely loved every second of it. Love that I found this channel.
5:33 did you just give us a new meme template?
Adam is always so enthusiastic about Mythbusters, It never gets old for him. Its beautiful.
when i watched gavin do the slow mo shots of him talking with and without a mask to see the spit droplets and stuff. I immediately thought of your myth about testing sneezes and doing the slow mo shots of sneezes in different color
Smartereveryday is one of my favorites. Such an amazing science channel.
Your explanation with the paper and the bulls eye was so simply beautiful.
Talking about setting the frame so your brain can process more quickly, that's why road signs and markings are designed in such a way that so no matter the type of intersection or sign you come across, even if you've never experienced that type or area before, you can more quickly process how to use that information.
Also it's why dumb doors suck.
As a commercial truck driver, poor signage drives me insane.
@smartereveryday and Adam Savage/Tested collaboration needs to happen!!!
Destin, I think you just received the Internet's version of the Congressional Medal of Honor with that compliment from Adam.
My favourite slow mo was the exploding cement truck, you could see the shock waves along the mountain and that sound will stay with me forever
I remember watching MythBusters with my family and I was always waiting for you to show your recordings from the high-speed cameras. For several years I have been dealing with high-speed cameras (mainly for testing in research laboratories) and each time I can't wait to see the final recording, no matter if it's a crash test, explosion or fluid mechanics.
Seriously Mr. Savage, you need to come back to TV and get a wider audience about science and how exciting it is, re ignite our imagination and fascination of the world around us. You have a great gift of captivating listeners and conveying information incredibly well. Thank you for all your hard work
My favourite thing about high speed shots apart from the visuals, the SOUND! It's sound design at it's finest.
It's hard to imagine MythBusters without the high speed shots.
So lovely to have a new - by which I mean not asked before - question and unleash Adam's excitement on the world once more.
One of the best things about Mythbusters opposed to other science adjacent programs is that they didn't dumb everything down to appease the lowest common denominator like others had the tendency to do. The Mythbusters also never went to the other extreme and made it sound like the most boring thesis paper ever put to film.
What ended up happening with missing the first cement truck explosion on high speed?
I think it was mentioned on the show at some point, maybe in one of the recap episodes, but apparently the high speed camera happened to malfunction right on that shot, so they had to play the regular camera shot back frame by frame as a substitute. There apparently just is no high speed footage in existence of the cement truck explosion.
I remember for a science project I tried measuring the speed of a model rocket using a regular camera and thanks to Mythbusters in 5th grade I knew everything I needed to do measure it.
The best slow motion I liked was the the motorhome explosion on the last season where the camera 🎥 was at 75,000 rpm. The best explosion ever.
Blowing up the cement truck is probably my favorite one.
Something else that’s a major benefit of conveying what’s happening immediately in a shot is that not only does it allow your brain to figure out what’s happening, it also allows your brain to be _wrong_ which lets you get surprised.
I feel like I understand everything you’ve ever done now that you explained that whole “the faster you get the narrative the more information you’re able to get from the following scene” thing.
adam savage mythbusters sequel when cause clearly he has tons of passion and love for it and misses it
Some of the machinery I work on at work folds cardboard boxes, squirts glue on specific parts, then stamps it and folds all the flaps in, it's not lightening fast but it's quicker than you can see if you're trying to figure out a fault... I film it forming the box in slow motion to see what's happening, every time I do that I'm amazed I can pull this thing out of my pocket and just do that.
I loved the use of the slo mo camera when they were checking the flight of arrows!
“Don’t have someone throw a water balloon at your face for a slow motion shot”
The Slow Mo Guys beg to differ
I loved Mythbusters, the high speed shots were beautifully done.
As an aside, I can't believe a $1000 I phone has such a low high speed frame rate.
its nice to see Adam's understanding of what brought him to our attention. obviously, he's so much more than Mythbusters, but most of us wouldn't have known him if it wasn't for that show.
he doesn't ignore it and seems to embrace it. many people don't like being remembered for one thing. like I said, he's so much more than that show, but thats what most of saw him doing.
(and loved it. still do.)
I love how eager Adam is to teach and share what he knows. And I totally feel like Adam with the 'you don't know how good you have it.' XD I remember how excited I was to get a camera that took a film that you just dropped in instead of needing to feed it into the camera and how revolutionary that was. And it's pretty obsolete now. Hell, the really nice digital camera my in-laws bought me for work is mostly useless compared to just using my phone. It's wild.
It's been so long since I've seen Mythbusters but I watched a lot and I still remember all those helpful markings and indications in frame. You guys did an amazing job
And I have never forgotten that shot of you being slapped since the first time I saw it. I bring it up in conversation on occasion, it's amazing
My favorite high speeds were the ones with the rocket sleds. The first one you could pretty much see the car vaporizing.
What i love about Adam, is that he shows zero resentment or disdain for myth busters to this day. He's still excited to tell stories and talk about it.
... and back then it was live TV and by the time we saw what it was you wanted us to see the moment had past and we could not rewind... so thank you for indicators and instant replays.
Back in about 2007, I got one of the first mobile phones which could do high speed recording. I think it was only 120fps but my housemate (a film student) and I had so much fun recording everything we could think of! I remember one time we spent most of an afternoon throwing water balloons at my bedroom window, recording from the inside, trying to find the right balance of 'water balloon breaks', 'window doesn't break', and 'looks good on camera'. We didn't get anything impressive, but I had nice clean windows afterwards!
The explanation of setting up a scene for a slow motion capture makes so much sense. I guess that’s one of the things I learned about today. Old video, but thought I’d say this either way
Adz, an absolute pleasure seing how emotional it is for you talking about mythbusters. I was devoted to the show.. before youtube. Still following Tory. Love the channel. I try to always like, rarely get to comment.
Really miss but still loved mythbusters. Will always follow you my ole friend.
Rob from UK : ) keep it together x
Forgot to mention the passion you have.. absolutely awesome. im sorry that with Furlough in UK and being a youth i haven't been able to be a patron... give me time and I'll hopefully buy all merch and support : )
Adam made me cry in the last episodes of mythbusters... He go soo emotional talking about all the probs that he was about to go smashing through.... Mythbusters was the best part of my child hood... It was fun learning.. thank u adam 👌
Thanks for taking time to answer questions like this. It's fascinating to learn about the production side of the show.
5:07 ... framing a high speed shot in a way that it tells the story of what's going to happen: I couldn't agree more. It's very helpful to understand the high level aspects of what's going on, so the viewer can concentrate on the interesting details the shot is meant to investigate. Thanks a lot for thinking of that! One of many nice puzzle pieces of making Myth Busters one of the best science for everyone programs that ever existed.
Myth busters is my favorite thing to watch on the science channel when I’m at my grandparents house.
I am also a huge fan of Destin on Smarter Every Day. I have one of his signed baseballs! I love watching him do crazy stuff. It's like watching Mythbusters again. I miss it and still watch the reruns every chance I get.
my favorite high speed shot from mythbusters was from dynamometer of death when they launched that tire belt through a car window and decapitated that ballistics gel head
I don’t know what that piece of paper means, but someone wearing adidas stepped on it
Thank you for your description of how and why to clearly delineate what's going to happen on the screen so that people can understand it fully. Such a key part of visual science communication. I've had a vague sense of that in the back of my head while making videos but it's incredibly useful to have it put into words like that.
Any high speed shot at the New Mexico school with the rocket sled is awesome. Also I loved the exploding cement truck. One frame later: boom, no more truck
That shot of the baseball glove and the leather turning to almost a liquid was one of the craziest things I've ever seen. Smarter Every Day is probably my favorite channel. Love his videos.
The Slo Mo guys capturing a tempered glass beaker shattering. Mythbusters worthy
What about *lighting* some of those high speed shots? It's apparent when watching some clips that the depth of field isn't very far at all, and when watching some of the setup for the shot you see ridiculous floods come on right before the event. Is that something just inherent to the limited exposure time per frame, or is there another way to mitigate that?
Yeah. With cameras, you either need a bright image or a long shutter speed. High speed photography requires a lot of light. Technically you can boost the sensor’s sensitivity (gain), but that’s going to reduce the overall quality of the image.
I suppose a really huge lens could capture more light (like astronomy does with telescopes). But that gets expensive, and I think has downsides like depth of focus (which again isn't a problem for astronomy when everything is effectively at infinity).
I don't know if a larger sensor can help; probably not much if at all. But a larger chunk of semiconductor costs more to manufacture.
The higher pixel resolution you want, the less light you're getting in each pixel, so again you need it brighter to get good signal-to-noise ratio. Cooling the detector (to cryogenic temps) can I think reduce noise, but that's very expensive. If better illumination is possible at all, it's usually the best bet. Thus, very bright spot / flood lights.
Adam and Destin together would be a dream come true!
The high speed shots were some of my favs from Mythbusters
We used high speed film cameras until about 2000, when we switched to high speed digital cameras for crash test analysis at work. I'm very familiar with the tech.
Lighting! Lighting! Lighting! If you want to know about the challenges of high speed video, getting sufficient light has to be one of the top ones. Also depth of field, which is also related to capturing sufficient light. Often, high speed video cameras use the lens wide open to gather more light and doing so results in miserably thin depth of field and difficult focusing. In order to keep something that travels toward or away from the camera in focus you need a tilt-shift lens and they're often not fast lenses.
You drew either a target or a 10 year old's version of a boob.
The problem with high speed cameras especially earlier models is their run time is so short your timing has to be rather precise.
7:47 "... each shot would tell the whole story of the experiment ..." -- Excellent reminder of something I was taught in science regarding the use of figures and tables. Ideally, in any scientific document, any given figure or table should be able to "stand on its own", i.e. it should be clear, concise, and complete enough that your reader can understand it, without necessarily having to refer back to the surrounding text of your document. (Of course, it rarely happens that way, because us scientists want to include EVERY LITTLE DETAIL instead of just focusing on what's important... 😅)
I want to see an Adam/Destin collab.
As soon as Discovery+ came out, I immediately began binge watching MythBusters, every episode from the pilots to the series finale.
What an insightful post, thank you for explaining what is important to show beforehand so you can just watch what happens instead of trying to figure out what WILL happen
I cant wait for Adams cameo in a Slow Mo Guy's video
I love these Q&A sessions! it's like snippits of new MB content and that helps take the sting away from the show having ended
For me, if it wasn't for the high speed camera used on Mythbusters, I would've never known what a pressure wave actually looks like, when an explosion happens.
That was always one of the cooler aspects of watch those in slo-mo.
Never get tired of Adam's enthusiasm!
There's a video on Applied Science about building a rig that spins a high speed camera around the action while recording, so the camera revolves entirely around the subject in the half second or so the shot covers.
It makes me so inexplicably happy that adam watches smarter everyday!!
In early 2000's when mythbusters just started, black and white phones were still the norm and watching their high speed footage was incredible. Today iphones can do the same and videos of high speed is all over YT. YT didnt even exist until the third season of MB. I feel old
Sooooo.... Adam's farts shut down production temporarily? 🤣🤣
I love that Adams phone wallpaper is basically a close up of some tools on his workbench!
It must be the trained film actor in you to NOT look into the lens of the camera. LOL! I love that you mentioned The SloMo Guys and Smarter Every Day! Two of my favorite YT channels!
Adam. I think the word you are looking for is 'priming'. Setting up the shot with all the markers primes the viewer with expectations about what is to come.
It's always nice when the people who do things I like tell me that they like other things I like. Yay for the shout-outs to Dan, Gav, and Destin!
One of my fav slomo shots was Jamie slapping Adam when they were drinking 😂
Awesome to hear you mention Destin and the Slo Mo Guys! Love them!
I've been wondering, where's the best place to watch all of the Mythbusters content nowadays?
The importance of explaining (in this context: visualizing) things (from 5:00)is extremely important even in trivial cases. I always have to argue with colleagues etc to put here that word or use here a different color to highlight this bit etc. "Why, this is obvious!" No, it's not when you are not prepared, when you see it at the first time, when you haven't used it for a while. People tend to get confused even in easy situations, and confusion understanding images is even more frequent.
Actually, in my experience is that you should state even the obvious if that's key for understanding something. This comes mostly from GUI programming (with very obvious reasons) but also simply explaining non trivial things.
That @SmarterEveryDay video was incredible to watch!