Is the slow motion capture a hardware function or software?

Kaustubh KatdareI was watching the Samsung Galaxy Camera video shot at 120 fps and it does look awesome in slow-motion. So, I'm wondering can any camera be made to function at any desired fps rate through software or it's all coded in the hardware; that once you set the hardware it can only function at a certain fps rate.

Would appreciate responses.

It is actually a hardware function. In my Canon EOS 600D, with the default firmware I can't capture videos with a frame rate higher than 30fps at full HD in PAL and 60fps at 720p. If I install a custom firmware "Magic lantern" I can capture videos at upto 40fps in full HD. But then that heats up the sensor. The hardware isn't made for that!

An easy way to capture slow motion safely with default firmware would be to interpret a 60fps 720p footage to 24fps footage. That gives a quite smooth output when a high shutter speed is used. Ah yeah, but that won't be full HD then!

Frame rates can be controlled by software side. How ?

- Consider, Camera shoots the video at 20 fps for 30 seconds, now that 30 second of video using high-speed is played & frame-rates will increase.

However slow motion has different mechanics :
- The camera usually captures the video faster than what's it is playbacked. Let's assume that camera captures the video at 30 fps of 20 seconds length, now when it is playbacked (the fps is reduced software side, let's assume 15 fps) so the same video will playback at 15 fps for 40 seconds.

So, I think this is software side tweak, i don't know possible way for fps control for hardware-side.

#-Link-Snipped-# : Thanks for the explanation. That makes things really easier to understand. I'm curious to know how is the fps rate determined by the hardware? Looks like I'll have to study it on some online resource. I'd prefer a brief explanation though 😀

Isn't the 120fps video shot with the Galaxy Camera of a very small resolution? At higher frame rate, a lot of data will be generated when the usual full resolution is used for recording (120fps will make 4 times the data at 30fps) that it can't be transferred to the storage medium at that rate in a normal hardware. It is like using a 5A wire to carry 25A current. That is one reason. Then there is the processor which needs to be capable of handling data at that rate. There would be even more reasons! 😁

I don't think it's small resolution. Check -

I did a quick search. Definitely not Full HD or 720p. It is 768x512 at 120fps. But decent enough!

That hardware won't be enough to capture 1080P videos at 120fps unlike those big boxes with the MythBusters 😁

Galaxy Camera - Possible video recording resolutions
Full HD 1920 x 1080 (30FPS)
1280 x 720 (60FPS)
HD 1280 x 720 (30FPS)
Slow motion 768 X 512 (120FPS)
640 x 480 (60FPS)
640 x 480 (30FPS)
Sharing 320 x 240 (30FPS)