(The video of a straight line rotating with a known rate can be used to measure the motion blur and calculate the camera's exposure time.)
Yes, I thought about this a bit yesterday and I think we don't even need to convert back to linear speed.
With a filled sector of a known angle on a rotating plate and measuring the apparent angle of the sector during video, we can directly infer the shutter speed. I came up with the following:
shutter speed = (measured angle / known angle) × angular speed- shutter speed: in s-¹
- measured angle: in °. Angle measured on video frame.
- known angle: in °. Actual angle measured physically.
- angular speed: in °/s.
The advantage of this is that it's independent of the distance of the rotating plate to the camera, and doesn't involve any calibration of the space.
(We can even instead divide the angular speed by the "blur factor" to get the denominator of the more familiar "1/x of a second" notation).
I'll try to set up the experiment tomorrow to see if I can deduce the shutter speed of some cameras.
The same setup under various illuminations would help understand if a given camera has several shutter speed levels during video, if it adjust itself during a single shoot, how often does this adjustment occur, etc.
