What the world would look like if 1 second were slowed down to 1 hour

We’ve seen some pretty extreme slow motion from The Slow Mo Guys, and it’s all very impressive and often satisfyingly beautiful. But unless you’re quick with maths in your head, it can be very difficult to see just how that equates to in real-time. Even when they tell you “this clip was x nanoseconds”, like, how fast is that really?

Well, in this video, Gav breaks it down into more manageable speeds for our brains to understand. Thanks to the new Phantom TMX7510, Gav can shoot 90,000 frames per second at a respectable resolution. How fast is this in real terms? Well, when played back at 25 frames per second, one second of real-time gets stretched out to an entire hour.

It’s essentially playing back at 1/3,600th of real-time (3,600 seconds in an hour and all that). Half an hour is half a second. 15 minutes is a quarter of a second. One second of actual slow-motion playback is 0.006944 seconds. Each individual frame is a mere 0.000278 seconds (or, well, perhaps half of that, assuming a 180° shutter angle).

To give you an idea of just how slowed down this video is if one second lasts for an hour then, as Gav explains, “a minute would last for two and a half days, an hour would last about five months and a day would come in at just under a decade at nine years and ten months. A month would last around three centuries and a year would be about 3,597 years”.

It’s insane how much detail and movement there is in very fast things that are just impossible to see when viewed with the naked eye – or even a camera that tops out at a measly 240 frames per second. While 90,000 frames per second probably isn’t all that practical for most filmmakers, it sure does look good – and pretty surreal.