Learning Physics with Video Analysis

Inspired by the pioneering work in photographic studies of motion and motion picture projection by Eadweard Muybridge in 1878 and by the high speed films of Harold Edgerton by the middle of the 20th century, the use of video has rapidly emerged nowadays as a powerful tool to teach physics at schools and universities, capturing what the human eye could not distinguish. To highlight the advantages of video analysis in learning physics, we describe in this paper a selected group of experiments particularly recorded to facilitate the conceptual understanding of the free-fall phenomenon.