nerdly_dood
Member
I think it's been pretty well established that many digital cameras don't take kindly to filming strobes.
A couple months ago I thought about this and took a sample video of the light on a phone company van. A simple amber strobe beacon, producing a bright triple-flash, with each flash at equal intensity.
http://s1006.photobucket.com/albums/af1 ... =00000.mp4
Yeah, it didn't turn out too well. But then a couple days ago the fire department had a mock dormitory fire at my university. It was around sunset, and they had a pumper here with a bunch of strobes on it, and using the very same camera, lo and behold, it worked just fine.
Fast forward to 10:44 for the strobes. And yes, the right-hand strobe on the front bumper is doing a double-flash, alternating with the quad-flash on the left-hand front bumper strobe and the center one above the grille - fast forward to 12:06 for the best view of that. The double-flash did appear to have more light output per flash than the quad-flash too.
My guess would be that filming in the sunlight caused the camera to take shorter exposures per frame, meaning that more flashes of the strobe happened between frames, but filming late in the evening, there was almost no time at all between frames, so almost every strobe flash was captured.
A couple months ago I thought about this and took a sample video of the light on a phone company van. A simple amber strobe beacon, producing a bright triple-flash, with each flash at equal intensity.
http://s1006.photobucket.com/albums/af1 ... =00000.mp4
Yeah, it didn't turn out too well. But then a couple days ago the fire department had a mock dormitory fire at my university. It was around sunset, and they had a pumper here with a bunch of strobes on it, and using the very same camera, lo and behold, it worked just fine.
Fast forward to 10:44 for the strobes. And yes, the right-hand strobe on the front bumper is doing a double-flash, alternating with the quad-flash on the left-hand front bumper strobe and the center one above the grille - fast forward to 12:06 for the best view of that. The double-flash did appear to have more light output per flash than the quad-flash too.
My guess would be that filming in the sunlight caused the camera to take shorter exposures per frame, meaning that more flashes of the strobe happened between frames, but filming late in the evening, there was almost no time at all between frames, so almost every strobe flash was captured.