I was wondering if anyone here can explain to me how slow motion video works when it is captured in real-time.

Is it called a rolling shutter? I have also heard that only the pixels that change are recorded to harddisk and later turned into frames with the information from the previous frame.

How does this work and can it be applied to other cameras?

From what I gather, all the extreme slow motion cameras nowadays record footage onto something like computer RAM. Only RAM is fast enough to store huge amounts of data in a small amount of time.

Analog formats (film and magnetic tape) can't capture that fast. However you can overcrank film cameras to like 60fps or something (not too sure on the exact number). That might be a cheap and reasonable way to get slow motion when you combine it with some computer trickery to fake more FPS.

What exactly are you trying to do?

I would like to be able to do real slow motion with video, not film.

What i have discovered so far is that the cameras work on Pentium PCs (1GHz and up) and come attached to a PCI card. They can do 500 full frames per second 1280 x 1024 resolution (uncompressed!) and up to 16000 frames per second with reduced resolution.

Found it here:

http://www.photron.com/products.cfm?id=5

Looks like the "fastcam pci" will work with a desktop. BUt you only get 8.5 seconds of recording time at 250 frames per second, and resolution is not that great compared to film.

High speed film cameras for industrial use can be bought cheap on ebay. Some will run over 500 frames per second. Of course, film aint cheap...

Well, I sent a pricelist request to that company that makes the PCI cameras, when they give me the pricing i will post it here for future reference. Thanks for the replies.