Minumum digital camera framerate for slow motion photography of a QCW coil

[NerdlabsMadScience]

Hi, it's walden and i am working on a youtube video about a qcw/staccato VTTC that i am planning to film in ultra slow motion for a montage.
My dad's Sony FS5 digital video camera records slow motion video at a max shutter speed of 960 FPS. I was wondering if this is fast enough to smoothly record the growing and branching of the QCW arcs through the air?

[klugesmith]

Try it and find out, or do more searching on Internet.   
Don't expect to earn a following on youtube with clever ideas and not much work (beyond filming and editing).
Good luck!

[edit] Also your title is misleading.   Sounds like you are asking about frame rate, not shutter speed.  The latter generally means the time, in seconds, that "shutter" is open for each frame. In some cases, it's intentionally much smaller than the time interval from frame to frame. Shutter speed matters, along with "speed" of the lens system (given as f/ stop number), when figuring illumination requirements.   

[Mads Barnkob]

The higher frame rate, you want a high as possible shutter opening time, but these are generally not settings you can mess with on a smartphone. You can choose 960FPS and that is it.

1000 FPS is NOT enough to see spark growth, the speed of a lightning bolt is pretty insane, some 300,000,000 km/h. This is for a lightning bolt discharge, so in a Tesla coil we grow the sparks over lets say 100us, so if you wanted to film that growth with 100 frame, you need a 1,000,000 FPS camera. (The 100us is however still composed of a series of AC cycles according to the resonant frequency of the Tesla coil)

Next issue, sparks are not as bright to a high speed camera as it is to the human eye. At those frame rates, barely any light gets to the sensor. This is why normal high speed filming uses enough lighting comparable to a small sun! This does not go so well with filming sparks in a dark room.

So with 1000 FPS, you would get around 0.1 frames per BPS.

It can still look cool in 1000 FPS being played back at some 10 FPS, but its still individual lightning bolts at different points in their growth.

I have made 1000 and 8000 FPS recordings of Tesla coils and the 1000 are kind of just like regular slowing down normal video and the 8000 is so faint (and low resolution) its hard to actually see the sparks. But at 8000 FPS I could capture the step leader and the subsequent growth.

[davekni]

I was wondering if this is fast enough to smoothly record the growing and branching of the QCW arcs through the air?

It's easy to calculate how many frames will cover one QCW burst.  If your QCW coil ramps over 10ms, then 960 FPS will capture 9.6 frames over that burst.  Probably enough frames to be interesting, especially to examine as individual photos to see how the arc progresses.

[Uspring]

In this post is a link to a QCW video at 960 fps:  https://highvoltageforum.net/index.php?topic=1268.msg10121#msg10121

[Mike]

Adding to Uspring's message, Smarter Everyday did a QCW tesal coil at 28k FPS.

[NerdlabsMadScience]

Sorry about the stupid mistake with the title, i have now fixed it. Thanks Mads, i have had success filming SGTC arcs with natural lighting at 960 fps and they weren't too dim. Also don't QCW sparks grow slower because of the ramping?
BTW a sony fs5 is not a smartphone