Researching and collecting your data.

Now that you have your question, start interrogating your clip for meaningful data. Right now your work resembles a test question without any givens. Provide something for you to make use of in your calculations. Examine your saved frames. Print them out and measure distances with a ruler. Compare the size of things you know to objects whose size you want to know. Be sure to think about what it means if the two objects you are comparing are at different distances from the camera, or at an angle, or.... You will have to make estimations. You may consider making several, so that you can produce a range of possible solutions. You should also know that your clip's time is read out in minutes:seconds:frames, where a frame is equal to 1/30 of a second. This should help you measure the time between events.

Some information you just won't be able to figure out by looking at the clip. Of course, using your knowledge of physics and estimated values for some quantities, you will attempt to calculate some of this "unknown information." However, you may need something you can't measure off of the clip to make your calculation. In this case be creative but considered. For example, you can't very well tell something's mass by looking at it, but you could calculate its mass if you knew its acceleration and the force which caused that acceleration. You could find the acceleration by measuring velocities off of the clip, but the force...? Maybe you should try flipping it around. What if you estimated the mass by massing something similar. Now you can calculate a value for the force, and that probably brings you to your next step.


Google
WWW www.davidcolarusso.com

Home | Privacy | Terms | FAQ | Credits | Tech Tips | Feedback
Last updated August 1, 2003
©2003 - David Colarusso