The 20 greatest slow-motion videos ever

By Nate Lanxon on 02 June 2008, 5:39pm

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Life moves too quickly for us pathetic humans, with masses of fascinating activity happening too fast for our meagre brains to interpret. So thank heavens for high-speed cameras. These marvellous inventions can capture thousands of frames per second, allowing a producer to slow down the footage so we can see exactly what happens when someone is punched in the face. One second of action can be played over several minutes, and without any apparent loss of playback smoothness -- so we can see what it looks like when you throw tiny pies at a wasp. Now that's progress.

The following 20 videos are, we feel, the most amazing slow-motion videos ever made. We'd love to know what you think. Our comments system below will filter out posts with URLs -- you don't want to see what people send us -- so please direct us to more incredible slo-mo action via our link-friendly forum. First up: food.

Edible objects make for great slow-motion videos as they have all the tasty innards of a dead animal, without the moral dilemmas involved in blowing them to smithereens.

Popcorn
Essential to movie viewing, despite tasting like a cross between cardboard and caramel, popcorn explodes because of internal pressure when heated -- and it looks even more delicious as it does so.

Egg versus samurai sword
You could take a hammer to crack a nut, but that would be beneath you. Take some pride, show some elan, and take a samurai sword to crack an egg. Check out that yolk-katana interface!