Gadgetory

charging is now complete test will commence in 4 seconds 3 2 1 1 Dec the cameras used by the IIHS or of course specialized to capture motion capturing motion means capturing many frames per second now where your video camera may capture 30 or 60 frames a second these guys do hundreds to thousands of frames a second here are the on board digital cameras that were going to be mounting on the door inside the car they use the IDT n X series compact cameras they also capture up to 700 30 frames a second our 4 megapixel which is ample because it matters more how many frames they capture rather than how huge each one is it's ruggedized so it can take the impact of the crash this one will be looking at the driver dummy to see how he interacts with the steering wheel the airbags and what's happening during the rest I'm draining all the fluids out of the vehicle that'll make the message right after the crash mounting a camera like this is key the technicians installed the base as a rigid part of the car's body I mean they really install it and of course they can use a bunch of fasteners because this car is not going back on the market those IDT cameras can take up to 200 G's in a hit and I'm always amazed how steady they are even at the moment of impact the cameras outside the car are even more impressive phantom flex imagers they're capable of nearly 2,600 frames a second at 1080 resolution put another way they have 32 gigabytes of internal memory and can fill that in 5.1 seconds for each tests we have set a predetermined positions for all of our digital imagers we want to make sure we're getting the exact same shot that we got the last time I ran this test so we can compare vehicle to vehicle need to but also make sure that we're consistent all the footage that we get now all of this of course is massively lit by a robotic light grid that ensures even lighting and virtually no shadows because that might obscure any small detail of how the car's components deform after the actual impact high-resolution stills are also captured using rather surprisingly a Hasselblad medium format film camera body harnessed to a phase-one digital back after the test we move the car to the photo studio where there's a large overhead light box and a fully programmable light control board as well as a seamless background and a turntable that sits on air Castor's that allows us to lift the car up and spin it to any position that we wish finally the center uses a DaVinci Resolve edit controller and color corrector to put the footage together and dial in the accuracy of its offer it pays to double check with the IIHS learns from this interesting process