Frame rate w/ this Sony speed camera

[bradleyheathhays]

I've got a strobe light I'm trying to figure out what exact frequency it's flashing at, and already being outclassed by my Canon EOS T7, I decided to hop on Amazon and pick up a Sony Cyber-Shot RX10 IV and to see if I could high speed frame rate capture some of these strobe flashes. I know just enough about either of these two cameras to be dangerous, so I had to look up on youtube to see EXACTLY how to set this Sony camera up to do the specific high speed shot I needed. Luckily I ended up figuring it out and now I have about 20 seconds of slowed down footage I need help analyzing.

Since the thing I was filming was a light source itself, and resolution didn't matter I was able to use the highest frame rate setting on the camera, which I believe was 960, even though I thought I had seen the frame rate advertised as 1000 somewhere. This might have something to do with NTSB vs. PAL possibly?

So now that I've got about a second of flash time recorded at that high frame rate (in the form about a 1MB mp4 on the SD card), what free editing program can I download and use to view this video and analyze this light's flash rate?

Thanks.

 

[JohnMcL7]

I'm not sure exactly what you're looking for in video editing software but generally my first port of call would be Davinci Resolve:

DaVinci Resolve | Blackmagic Design

Professional video editing, color correction, visual effects and audio post production all in a single application. Free and paid versions for Mac, Windows and Linux.

www.blackmagicdesign.com

They offer a free version which has surprisingly few limitations and is extremely capable, it's also very well supported so if you're needing any help there's lots of videos and guides out there to help you. It is quite overwhelming to start with but you can just go straight to the edit module, drop your clips in then edit them as you want.

 

[bradleyheathhays]

Thanks John. Yes I installed DR and now I'm trying to get it imported so I can look at it frame by frame, but no luck so far.

Would you be able to coach me on how to get my .MOV file imported and displayed in this frame format?

 

[TCR4x4]

Thanks John. Yes I installed DR and now I'm trying to get it imported so I can look at it frame by frame, but no luck so far.

Would you be able to coach me on how to get my .MOV file imported and displayed in this frame format?

Just import it and then use the arrow keys to scrub through frame by frame. Nothing special you need to do.

 

[JohnMcL7]

Thanks John. Yes I installed DR and now I'm trying to get it imported so I can look at it frame by frame, but no luck so far.

Would you be able to coach me on how to get my .MOV file imported and displayed in this frame format?

If you're only needing to see the individual frames and not needing to do any actual editing then you can use something like VLC and then press the E button, this will advance the video one frame at a time.

If you are still wanting to do this in Davinci Resolve, these are the steps that will do it (may not be the best ones, I'm still learning the software at the moment):
- Start Davinci Resolve and when it offers you the choice of a project, double click Untitled Project which should take you to the main Davinci screen
- Click the Edit button at the bottom of the screen, next to the Cut button
- Go to your video file in your file explorer (outwith Davinci) and drag it onto the timeline, this is the section in the lower middle of the screen
- You'll get a window popping up asking to Change Project Frame Rate, click Change
- The first frame of your video should now be in the preview window at the upper right and pressing left and right on the arrow keys will move forward or backwards one frame at a time

 

[bradleyheathhays]

Update is I finally figured out the flash rate. It wasn't with Resolve though. I ended up using an online program someone suggested called VSDC.

So now, I need to confirm my video was filed at 960 fps. To make a long story short, it could be either 960 or 1000 fps.

How can I figure out my video's fps? Is there any kind of meta file it has associated with it that lists fps, sort of like viewing a file's properties?

 

[JohnMcL7]

Looking at the specs I think if it's a pal camera it will be 25p/50p 1000fps and if it's NTSC it will be 30p/60p 960fps. The file isn't stored as a 1000fps two second video instead if you look at the properties you'll see it's a 40 second (or maybe more for your camera) at 50fps. If you go down a bit in this review to the RX100mkIV it has a screenshot of the HFR menu in both PAL and NTSC, for PAL it shows 250/500/1000 and in NTSC it shows 240/480/960fps.

So if you look at your HFR menu and it's showing 1000fps then I think that's what the video will actually be, you can double check this by looking at your video properties and see if it's at 50 frames per second rather than 60. I've also done a frame count on one of my two second clips and it's 2064 which doesn't quite match 1000fps but my camera is definitely in this mode.

 

[4wd]

For more conventional video this shows a lot of info about it.

MediaInfo

MediaInfo is a convenient unified display of the most relevant technical and tag data for video and audio files

mediaarea.net