Shooting Slow Motion Videos using Raspberry Pi Camera

There was a time when I said “Even with the best of camera hardware, we are still slave to its features. Thanks to the raspberry pi camera, we will make a camera do whatever our heart desires.” This quote has been proven more true by the Team at Broadcom who released new camera modes for Raspberry Pi camera. One of the new modes is the ability to shoot videos at 90 fps albeit at a lower resolution. Just look around you, even with the best of hardware on Flagship smartphones and most of the high end DSLRs, there is no option to capture 90fps. Even Peter Jackson was able to shoot The Hobbit at just 60 fps HFR (although that was Full HD or maybe even higher). The point here is that now we have the capability to shoot videos in High frame rates but it is of no use as our eyes cannot perceive the differences with the higher frame rates. The way we can utilise the higher frame rates is for slowing it down for cool slow motion effects. The reason I thought of writing this article is because I thought achieving slow motion using Raspberry Pi would be difficult as it would involve capturing the video at 90 fps in H264 format, converting it to MP4 at the same fps and then slowing it down to run at 30fps. After trying it myself, I found out that it can be done pretty easily.

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