Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

For my science fair project I am doing a video analysis of how different moves effect the acceleration of turns, but... I don't know how to do a video analysis? HELP!

Hello and welcome to the forum.

I did a quick Internet search and found several answers to your question. There is even a FOSS project to do this: http://www.forevid.org/

Why don't you do some searching and reading about frame by frame video analysis and then ask us some specific questions?

Keith

No offense but I am not an engineer. I don't even know what a video analysis is or what research to conduct on it besides typing in 'video analysis' into Google and trying to make sense of the results. I really need help breaking down exactly what it is so I can focus on how to do it for my project.

A video camera takes frames at a constant rate. In the countries where the power frequency is 60 Hz, the standard is typically 30 half frames per second. If the motion you are trying to measure is in the same geometrical "Plane" and the video camera is pointed perpendicular to the plane of motion, you can determine where each object is at fixed sample intervals. By knowing where an object is at each sample point, you can use some math to determine the aproximate change in position with respect to time and the aproximate change in rate of change of position with respect to time.

If the motion is not in an "orthoganal" plane to the camera, the calculations get more complicated and you may need multiple cameras to be able to determine where each object is at each sample time.