Here are two videos of lightning strikes. First, a Russian soccer player survives a hit (strike at t=4 seconds):
Second, a cow in Idaho maybe (or maybe didn’t) survive a hit (strike at t=22 seconds):
If you pause each video, you can use your . and , keys to advance or go back frame-by-frame, letting you linger on any frame you want. In each video, the bright light of the strike only lasts for one frame.
My question is about the odd stripey features appearing in each video. In the first video, these appear in the sky 1-2 frames after the strike; in the second video, they appear in the same frame as the strike. These features are like horizontal dashed lines - but the interesting thing is that they are thick lines, i.e. each spans several lines of pixels, with the dark/light segments in each line of pixels synchronized with the dark/light segments in the lines above/below it.
The other interesting thing is that these same thick, dashed lines appear in both videos. One is in Idaho, one is in Russia; it would be surprising if these were both the same model of camera. So why the similarity in these artifacts? What’s going on in the camera to make these happen?
My guess is temporal aliasing due to a rolling shutter. Basically the picture is done line by line instead of all at one instant per frame, so the actual flash was only captured for that horizontal section of the one frame.
Those look like bit errors to me. Maybe the electric field of the bolt is messing w the camera’s RAM or processor.
As to why the bolt is just a wide horizontal band with no bolt above, that’s entirely because of the rastering of the recording. While the cow is hidden behind the white band, there is zero bolt visible above where we know the cow is.
Why no bolt? We know it came down from the sky.
Because when that area of the recording was made a few milliseconds earlier the bolt hadn’t happened yet. But that area is the area being processed by the computer & being written to RAM or the disk or whatever storage system is relevant.
Yeah, the blaze-white zone is easy to make sense of if you understand the rolling-scan behavior of CMOS sensors and how it affects the capture of highly transient events. It’s the same reason airplane propellers get rendered as visions of Lovecraftian horror:
See also “jello distortion” to understand the world-wobbling effect observed when the camera is shaken.
I was mostly curious to understand those stripey artifacts in the sky - in particular, why two cameras that almost certainly come from two different manufacturers would show such similar behavior from a nearby lightning strike.
I’m terribly sorry for missing this the first time around - I had to look carefully at the top right corner to find the artifact in the first video you linked. I’m guessing those pixelated “dotted lines” are an artifact introduced by video compression.
As an aside from the video artifacts:
That first video looks horrific. How did he survive that? From the look of the video, all I can see immediately after the strike is a puff of black smoke and a pile of black ashes. It looks like the kid got instantly vaporized.
I think the puff of black smoke is actually coarse black rubber dust, kicked up from the artificial turf. In the moments after the strike, you can see it rise up, accelerate downwind, and then fall back down to the turf again. The shape of the cloud is consistent with the turf damage seen in a still photo near the end of this article.
Besides the stunning lightning strikes, the most amazing thing to me here was the new knowledge that you can single-frame step through YouTube videos using the “,” and “.” keys. I have spent years trying to pause videos at some precise moment, only to be frustrated.
(and yes, it’s the rolling shutter.)
In our new world, my wife and I have found ourselves recording videos for church of us playing hymns on the piano and bass. I learned early on that putting the camera on a tripod and playing full volume would result in jello, particularly when I hit certain resonant notes (I think low A did the trick).
Likewise, I never knew that until this thread, and I often wanted to know if it was possible. Ignorance fought again! (And definitely took longer than we thought.)
It looked like the lo-tech “special effects” used occasionally in Monty Python’s Flying Circus when someone would spontaneously explode for some reason.
Indeed, the soccer video looks rather fake with a simple one-frame flash and some dust/particle effects straight out of the Blender VFX library, made even easier since this was shot from a still security camera.
On the other hand, despite the way it looks, it seems to be legit. Not 100% positive, but more likely than not. I guess a daytime storm, a pretty weak strike, and a camera not set up for capturing lightning in bright conditions makes for rather unimpressive video footage.
I’ve been involved in a long-running discussion elsewhere about the legitimacy of this video. If it’s a fake, it’s the most thorough and convincing fake I’ve ever seen. There are numerous other versions of that video on YouTube, some of which allow you an uninterrupted view of the events after the strike. The players on the sideline all exhibit a plausible acoustic startle reflex, consistent with the sound propagation time and published estimates of startle reflex times. The ensuing chaos, as the sideline players first start to run for cover and then slowly realize that Ivan is on the field, not moving, and needs help. The reasonable arrival and departure times for the ambulance. The black cloud, the movement of which is consistent with coarse black rubber dust kicked up from the turf (it rises straight up, and then drifts downwind while falling back to earth). The later photo of the artificial turf, showing a damage pattern consistent with the shape of the black cloud. The partially healed burns on the player’s neck, consistent with published images of other lightning/necklace injuries.
Any of these details could be faked, but for an aspiring faker to have accounted for all of them and rendered all of them so well is a tall order. On top of which it would be a very large conspiracy, with all of these players and the coach (and an ambulance crew) being in on it. A month later, nobody has spilled the beans, and I can’t find any news agency (from the dozens that reported it) that’s issued a retraction.
What would be the motive for producing such an elaborate fake?
