Overview

Time Warp is a popular science-themed television program produced for the Discovery Channel in the United States, in which Jeff Lieberman, an MIT scientist, teacher, and artist, along with high speed camera expert Matt Kearney, use their high speed camera to examine everyday occurrences and singular talents. Time Warp captures common everyday events and views them again in slow motion to uncover the many principles of physics. To do so, they examine things such as a drop of water, explosions, gunshots, ballet dancing, cornflour, shallow water diving, X games and sometimes some uncanny things like piercing one's cheek or standing on blades. The high speed cameras are used at as low as 500 frame/second for capturing how dogs drink to as high as 40,000 frame/second for capturing bullets, breaking glass, etc. Speeds above 20,000 frame/second are shot in black and white as the data for lightness and darkness is reduced when there is no color value to shoot. This is because the recording is digital and so the frame rate is limited to a certain data rate and black and white footage is much smaller than full color.