See that video up there (requires QuickTime)? That’s less than half the size (and not of the quality) of what’s coming.

With my Web hosting account, I pay for a lot of space and a lot of bandwidth. While I have future plans for a chunk of that space and bandwidth, my calculations say that I should still have plenty left over (famous last words, right?). Well, I’m about to put some hurt on a piece of that “left over.”

I have been talking with my friend, and fly-casting physicist, Grunde Løvoll, and we are going to release some of his 500fps (frames-per-second) videos of fly casting. We have already made use of some of these videos in the “The Rod & The Cast” article, and Grunde’s vids are currently hosted in low-resolution format elsewhere on the Web, but we aren’t satisfied with that. In order to appreciate the videos fully (if you dig that kind of thing—and they are pretty cool), or to do better studies with whatever software you have (for the seriously hard-core geeks out there), I agreed to host a collection of the full-resolution 1024X768 videos here at FF&W.

The 1024X768 resolution is native to the high-speed camera, and the files still look really good with modest MPEG1 compression. Each of these upcoming files will likely run in the 18MB to 28MB range (approximately), so it will pay to have a fast connection. These files will be linked as downloads, so to reduce  bandwidth usage, please pull the file(s) to your hard-drive to watch/re-watch.

So, a special thanks to Grunde for releasing the full-resolution videos to a wider audience, and I hope that they help fly fishers to better see (and perhaps understand) the types of things that are really going on in a fly cast. Oh, and stayed tuned for at least one more article that uses these videos as data sources/references.

I should mention that I am also going to host a few of the mo-cap videos from the Fly Casting Institute (I may also mirror them on the FCI site, proper). These vids are great for quick visual studies, since they include velocity trackers that show how far and in which direction the rod, hand(s) and sometimes line are moving over time. I’ll see what I can do about getting more mo-cap stuff up here (and the FCI site), as well, since we have the full 3-D data sets lurking in the bowels of a hard-drive (just need mo-cap machine time to extract them and make them useful).